Obit watch: March 28, 2021.

March 28th, 2021

It has been a busy weekend, so I’m only getting to this one now: Beverly Cleary. I’m not going to sneer at the description of her as “beloved children’s author”: everything I’ve seen about her points to her being a kind and gentle soul who had a long full life.

The children’s books she read at school disappointed, she recalled in an article for The Horn Book in 1982. The protagonists tended to be aristocratic English children who had nannies and pony carts, or poor children whose problems disappeared when a long-lost rich relative turned up in the last chapter.
“I wanted to read funny stories about the sort of children I knew,” she wrote, “and I decided that someday when I grew up I would write them.”

“Beverly Cleary Wrote About Real Life, and Her Readers Loved Her for It“.

Cleary didn’t start writing until she was in her early 30s. She’d talked about it for years and, in “My Own Two Feet,” describes an epiphany she had while working at Sather Gate Book Shop in Berkeley: “One morning during a lull, I picked up an easy-reading book and read, ‘Bow-wow. I like the green grass, said the puppy.’ How ridiculous, I thought. No puppy I had known talked like that.”

Posted in Books, Obits | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 361

March 27th, 2021

When I win the lottery, one of the things I want to collect is a complete run of the “Notable British Trials” series. I have a few paperbacks which contain edited versions of some of the trials, but I don’t have any complete volumes, reprint or otherwise.

One of the paperbacks I do have contains the trial of William Joyce. Students of history may know him better as “Lord Haw Haw“.

“The Story of Lord Haw Haw and his Trial”, a 2015 BBC radio documentary. Since this is radio, you could put it on as background while you do something else.

Bonus: As long as we’re talking about trials, here’s a little something from the “Timeline” folks: “The Origins of Witch Trials”, part 1:

Part 2:

Posted in Books, History, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 26, 2021 (supplemental).

March 26th, 2021

Larry McMurtry, noted antiquarian book dealer.

In a 1976 profile of Mr. McMurtry in The New Yorker, Calvin Trillin observed his book-buying skills. “Larry knows which shade of blue cover on a copy of ‘Native Son’ indicates a first printing and which one doesn’t,” Mr. Trillin wrote. “He knows the precise value of poetry books by Robert Lowell that Robert Lowell may now have forgotten writing.”

…

Mr. McMurtry’s private library alone held some 30,000 books and was spread over three houses. He called compiling it a life’s work, “an achievement equal to if not better than my writings themselves.”

He also wrote books sometimes.

Over more than five decades, Mr. McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels and many books of essays, memoir and history. He also wrote more than 30 screenplays, including the one for “Brokeback Mountain” (written with Ms. Ossana, based on a short story by Annie Proulx), for which he won an Academy Award in 2006.
But he found his greatest commercial and critical success with “Lonesome Dove,” a sweeping 843-page novel about two retired Texas Rangers who drive a herd of stolen cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a popular television mini-series.

…

From the start of his career, Mr. McMurtry’s books were attractive to filmmakers. “Horseman, Pass By” was made into “Hud,” directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman. Mr. McMurtry’s funny, elegiac and sexually frank coming-of-age novel “The Last Picture Show” (1966) was made into a film of the same title in 1971 starring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. The movie of his 1975 novel, “Terms of Endearment,” directed by James L. Brooks and starring Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger and Jack Nicholson, won the Academy Award for best picture of 1983.

I haven’t read “Last Picture Show”, but the Saturday Night Movie Group watched the movie just a few weeks ago. It has a lot going for it (like a young Ms. Shepherd) but as Lawrence put it, it is a good movie that we never want to watch again. (A motion to obtain and watch “Texasville” was resoundingly defeated.)

….

Thanks to his friendship with Mr. Kesey, Mr. McMurtry made a memorable cameo appearance in Tom Wolfe’s classic of new journalism, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968). The book details Mr. Kesey’s drug-fueled journey across America, along with a gang of friends collectively known as the Merry Pranksters, in a painted school bus.
In the scene, Mr. Kesey’s bus, driven by Neal Cassady, pulls up to Mr. McMurtry’s suburban Houston house, and a naked and wigged-out woman hops out and snatches his son. Mr. Wolfe describes Mr. McMurtry “reaching tentatively toward her stark-naked shoulder and saying, ‘Ma’am! Ma’am! Just a minute, ma’am!’”

Interestingly, he went on to marry Ken Kesey’s widow in 2011. But:

After completing “Terms of Endearment,” he entered what he described as “a literary gloom that lasted from 1975 until 1983,” a period when he came to dislike his own prose. He had a heart attack in 1991, followed by quadruple-bypass surgery. In the wake of that surgery he fell into a long depression during which, he told a reporter, he did little more than lie on a couch for more than a year.
That couch belonged to Ms. Ossana, whom Mr. McMurtry had met in the 1980s at an all-you-can-eat catfish restaurant in Tucson. They began living together, and collaborating shortly afterward — Mr. McMurtry writing on a typewriter, Ms. Ossana entering the work into a computer, often editing and rearranging.
“When I first met Larry, he was involved with about five or six different women,” Ms. Ossana told Grantland.com in 2014. “He was quite the ladies’ man. I was always really puzzled. One day I said to him, ‘So all of these women are your girlfriends?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Well, do they know about one another?’ He said, ‘Nooo.’”

“an all-you-can=eat catfish restaurant”. I live for these telling details.

Mr. McMurtry sometimes felt the sting of critical neglect. “Should I be bitter about the literary establishment’s long disinterest in me?” he wrote in “Literary Life,” a 2009 memoir. “I shouldn’t, and mostly I’m not, though I do admit to the occasional moment of irritation.” In the late 1960s and early ’70s, he liked to tweak his critics by wearing a T-shirt that read “Minor Regional Novelist.”

THR. Variety. I would link to Publisher’s Weekly, but they don’t seem to have run an obit yet. WP.

“Some claim the three essential books in Texas history are the Bible, the Warren Commission report and Larry McMurtry’s ‘Lonesome Dove,’ ” historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in a 2017 New York Times essay.

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 360

March 26th, 2021

Here’s a two-parter for you. From 1966, and an old show for children called “Discovery“.

“The World Beneath the Sea”, part 1. This is mostly about marine animal life.

“The World Beneath the Sea”, part 2. This concentrates a lot on things like scuba diving, minisubs, and SeaLab II, which would have been right up my alley when I was a child (and is still right up my alley today).

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Obit watch: March 26, 2021.

March 26th, 2021

Bertrand Tavernier, noted French film director.

The Saturday Night Movie Group has watched “In the Electric Mist“, which is an interesting but flawed adaptation of James Lee Burke’s In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (affiliate links). And I’ve seen “Coup de Torchon“, which is likewise an interesting adaptation of Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 (ditto). It seems to me, just looking at his filmography, that he was one of the more interesting French directors.

Jessica Walter. Damn.

I have never seen an episode of “Arrested Development”, but the Saturday Night Movie Group has watched quite a bit of “Archer”. We’ve also watched “Play Misty For Me”, which I think is a swell Clint Eastwood directed film.

And she appeared in every damn thing at some point, too: “Quincy, M.E.”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “Banacek”, “McCloud”, “The F.B.I.”. “Cannon”, “Mission: Impossible”…

…and she did a guest shot on “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”, in the episode “Please Note We Are No Longer Accepting Letters of Recommendation from Henry Kissinger”. Really, that’s the title, and if it comes up in reruns, you should seek it out (assuming you have a taste for black comedy). She’s basically playing a live action Mallory Archer: a social climbing woman who’s obsessed with her grandson attending the right pre-school. (“If it wasn’t for me, he’d be eating yams and watching ‘Jerry Springer'”.)

…and, yes! She was a “Mannix” three-timer. (“The Danford File”, season 6, episode 24. “Moving Target”, season 5, episode 18. “Who Is Sylvia?”, season 3, episode 19.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | 4 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 359

March 25th, 2021

Travel Thursday!

Today, we journey to the Outer Limit.

Well, actually, not that one, though these folks did manage to control the horizontal and the vertical.

This is a vintage (1969) promo film from Boeing, “The Outer Limit”, about the flight testing and introduction of the 747.

I’m fudging the definition of travel a bit with that one, but it is short. The next one is, admittedly, long, but it lets me cross another state off the list, and it is a place I enjoy visiting.

“The City of Las Vegas, the Early Years”. This covers the period from 1905 to 1920. See? Who says Vegas doesn’t have a sense of history?

Bonus: I’ve griped before about the hard hat tour of Hoover Dam (which I was lucky enough to go on) and how it was shut down after 9/11. Well, here’s a video (a little over 30 minutes long) of the hard hat tour from March 2001.

“If you’re going home by plane, wear the hard hat on the plane. It scares the heck out of the other passengers.” Man, wasn’t that a simpler time?

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Obit watch: March 24, 2021.

March 24th, 2021

George Segal. THR. Variety. I feel bad about not saying more, but he was an icon, and it seems like everyone is paying deserved tribute to him.

Houston Tumlin. If you saw “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby”, he was Ricky Bobby’s son. That was his only acting role. He was 28 years old.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

By way of Lawrence, Elgin Baylor.

Baylor was voted to the all-N.B.A. team for the league’s first 50 years. He was a 10-time N.B.A. first-team All-Star selection and averaged more than 30 points a game for three consecutive seasons in the early 1960s.
He set a league record by scoring 64 points against the Boston Celtics in November 1959, then scored 71 against the Knicks in November 1960, only to see Chamberlain score 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors against the Knicks in March 1962.
Baylor joined with West and later with Chamberlain to turn the Lakers into a glamour team. He played in eight N.B.A. final series, but the Lakers lost seven times to the Celtics in the Bill Russell era and then to the Knicks in a memorable Game 7 at Madison Square Garden in 1970.

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 358

March 24th, 2021

Let’s take a coffee break.

“The £299 Aldi Espresso Machine – How Bad Could It Be?”

Oddly enough, I don’t shop at Aldi either, and for the same reason: the nearest one to us is about 30 miles away.

Bonus #1: Since we’ve talked about an espresso machine, how about we talk about a can opener? A very specialized can opener, that is: this one opens powder cans for the 16″ guns on the Battleship New Jersey.

Bonus #2, and a little shout-out to the Saturday Night Movie Group. From the “Old Car Memories” channel, Jim Rockford’s Firebird.

Posted in Cars, Coffee, Food, Guns, History | 1 Comment »

“Do you like…pancakes?”

March 23rd, 2021

Pickup lines, automatically generated by GPT-3.

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 357

March 23rd, 2021

I was talking with my brother about calculator watches recently, which reminded me of this video from Techmoan: “Hewlett Packard HP-01 1977’s Smartest Watch”.

As a HP geek, I would kind of like to have one of these: however, examples in good condition are expensive.

Bonus #1: I also thought it might be interesting to do some startup videos. Not tech startups, but starting up things. For example, an Airbus A320:

Bonus #2: Or a railroad locomotive.

Bonus #3: Or a DC-3.

Bonus #4: Or a tractor, “with a 12 guage shotgun shell”. I believe this gives new meaning to the term “shotgun start“.

Posted in Geek, History, Planes, Trains | 4 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 356

March 22nd, 2021

Yeah, I think we’re doing Military History Monday. Also, I have a doctor’s appointment today, and expect to be pretty much useless afterwards, so I’m queuing up a couple of longer ones.

This is an OSS training film from 1944, “Undercover”.

The film analyzes preparation, arrival, establishment, and “prevalent cover” for secret agents by presenting one movie within another, as introduced by Col. Robertson, chief of Schools and Training at Office of Strategic Services.

Bonus: “Evading Capture in Enemy Territory” from 1957.

Using dramatic reenactments, this Cold War-era U.S. Air Force training film teaches American airmen how to evade capture and make their way home out of hostile territory after being shot down from their aircraft. All the capture evasion skills learned during World War 2 are put to good use, along with lessons learned by the CIA on how to operate in Eastern Europe.

I have an idea that I’m still kicking around in my head for a post on a somewhat related topic: OPSEC, or operational security. You’d be surprised (unless you’re someone like Borepatch) how many people seem to have no concept of OPSEC and make basic stupid mistakes…

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Obit watch: March 22, 2021.

March 22nd, 2021

Kent Taylor. He founded and ran the Texas Roadhouse chain of restaurants.

According to the reports I’ve seen, he was suffering from serious post-COVID-19 symptoms, and committed suicide.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Posted in Food, Obits | Comments Closed

You see the signs, but you can’t read…

March 21st, 2021

Sometimes, the warning signs are lit up with neon and searchlights, and people still miss them.

A married pair of San Francisco entrepreneurs were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, the latest twist in the saga of a once trendy, now bankrupt fecal matter-testing startup.
Zachary Schulz Apte and Jessica Sunshine Richman, co-founders of defunct microbiome testing company uBiome, are accused of bilking their investors and health insurance providers, federal prosecutors said. They were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit health care fraud and money laundering.

Now, I’m just a poor dumb white boy from Hampden, but I feel like there’s at least two big warning signs that were missed here.

1.

San Francisco-based uBiome was founded in 2012, and kicked off the company in an unusual way for a biotech startup: via a Kickstarter campaign. Its offering was an at-home test to sequence the DNA of its customers gut microbiome, which could then in turn purportedly be used to improve health.

I’m an absolute believer that you should avoid – indeed, run away from – any crowd funding campaign that is medical or health care related.

2.

In 2018, Richman was even named an “innovator” winner in Goop’s “The Greater goop Awards” and at its peak, uBiome was valued at $600 million.

Goop? Seriously? No s–t.. Again: anything that’s recieved an award from Goop, is promoted on Goop, or has any involvement with Goop: run like hell in the other direction.

Posted in Geek, Law, Stupid | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 355

March 21st, 2021

Science Sunday!

I’ve been fascinated by rocks and rock hunting and geology since I was a young child.

I’m just not very good at it. So instead, I enjoy reading the works of others, like John McPhee.

Mr. McPhee talks with Eldridge Moores, a University of California geologist (and collaborator with Mr. McPhee on Assembling California) and reads from Annals of the Former World (affiliate link).

Bonus #1: “A Brief History of Colorado Through Time”. I used to collect those “Roadside Geology of…” books. I should at least go out and replace my copy of Roadside Geology of Texas (affiliate link). Perhaps I will be able to use it soon.

Bonus #2: “Flood Basalts of the Pacific Northwest”. Or, giant lava flows!

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 21, 2021.

March 21st, 2021

George Bass. I think he may have been an obscure figure to most folks: Dr. Bass (a professor at Texas A&M) was one of the pioneers of underwater archeology.

After being honorably discharged in the late 1950s, he pursued a Ph.D. in classical archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, an American photojournalist named Peter Throckmorton was researching Turkish sponge divers and learned that they knew of ancient artifacts on the ocean floor. Mr. Throckmorton wrote to the renowned archaeologist Rodney Young seeking sponsorship for a proper excavation. Professor Young turned to one of his graduate students who specialized in the Bronze Age and had enthusiastically read accounts of deep sea dives — George Bass.
Mr. Bass was less than fully prepared. He had time for only six weeks of a 10-week diving course at a Philadelphia Y.M.C.A. And before joining the expedition and diving 100 feet into the Mediterranean, he had tried on a tank just once and gone no deeper than 10 feet — in a pool. Yet that first trip became the foundation for the rest of his career.
“You have to be young and ignorant and naïve to get anywhere,” he reflected in a 2010 interview with the Penn Museum.

…

Early on, archaeologists who sought to take advantage of the aqualung remained aboveground, relying on reports from hired divers, who lacked archaeological expertise. Professor Bass took a more hands-on approach. He became the first archaeologist to do his own diving while supervising other divers. And he organized on-site training in underwater excavation methods for fellow archaeologists and students.
With help from scientists he recruited for his teams, he engineered new methods for removing artifacts from the seabed and for spending long periods underwater. One crucial early insight was that objects that look like rocks may actually be the corroded remnants of metal goods. Professor Bass X-rayed what he found interesting. If a rocklike object contained an inner cavity where a metal artifact used to be, he would pour epoxy inside and cast a replacement.
His excavations produced illuminating material about ancient shipbuilding. His first expedition, off Cape Gelidonya in Turkey, solved a puzzle about why Homer refers to brushwood on Odysseus’s ship. The remains of a sunken ship there revealed that brushwood had been used as a cushion for heavy cargo to protect the hull.
Deborah Carlson, the president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, which Professor Bass helped create and then ran for much of his life, ultimately in Texas, said he deserved to be considered the founder of the field.
“Under his direction, ancient shipwrecks were excavated underwater for the first time,” she said in a phone interview. “He did it by taking his archaeological training and putting on scuba gear and taking the excavation to a new dimension.”

Roger Baldwin. He and three of his Army buddies – Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott, collectively known as the “Four Horsemen of Aberdeen” – were early pioneers of basic blackjack strategy.

It led Edward O. Thorp, a mathematics professor and blackjack expert, to validate their calculations on an IBM 704 computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and to write the best-selling 1962 book, “Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One,” which helped bring the Army group to public renown.
Mr. Thorp recalled the influence of the men’s strategy in his 2017 memoir, “A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market.” “The Baldwin group,” he wrote, showed that the advice of the reigning experts was poor, unnecessarily giving the casinos an extra two percent advantage.”
Arnold Snyder, a renowned author of blackjack books, said by phone: “No one actually knew what the right strategy was because it hadn’t been calculated. They figured out what to do if your hand totals 15 and the dealer has an 8 up: do you hit or do you stand?”

Dick Hoyt, marathon runner. He ran the Marine Corps Marathon in 1992 and finished in 2:40:47.

Oh, I forgot to mention, it should be “they”, not “he”. Dick Hoyt was was pushing his disabled son, Rick Hoyt, in a wheelchair the whole way.

Rick Hoyt was born in 1962, a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy, unable to control his limbs or speak. “We had long since learned how to interpret our son’s smiles and nods,” Dick Hoyt wrote in his 2010 book, “Devoted: The Story of a Father’s Love for His Son.” “But as good as everyone in the family was about figuring out what Rick needed, we were still only making educated guesses.”
But in 1972, engineers at Tufts University built a computer that allowed Rick to communicate by choosing letters with a tap of his head. His first words were “Go Bruins,” revealing a passionate love for sports.
In 1977, Rick asked to be involved in a five-mile benefit run. Though his father was not a competitive runner, he pushed Rick in his wheelchair the entire distance, finishing next to last.
“When my dad and I are out there on a run, a special bond forms between us,” Rick Hoyt told The New York Times in 2009 with the help of his computer voice program. “And it feels like there is nothing Dad and I cannot do.”

You might remember this from one of Rick Reilly’s SI essays.

Posted in Geek, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

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