She was the real estate agent in “The Amityville Horror” and “Clocktower Lady” in “Back to the Future”. She also did a bunch of TV: no “Mannix”, but “Quincy, M.E.”, “The A-Team”, “Wiseguy”, and one of the “Rockford Files” movies, among other credits.
–Judge Learned Hand, Speech to the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York, October 24, 1952.
Oddly enough, that quote popped up on this morning’s “Perry Mason” episode.
I’m thinking, if you held a gun to my head and asked me to pick a favorite judge, it would be Learned Hand. I feel like I should apologize to Judge Willett for that, but I also have a feeling that if he heard me say that, he’d agree Learned Hand is a good choice.
Travel Thursday has been delayed until tomorrow, because this is also my happy Guy Fawkes Day post for all my homies in the United Kingdom. This is also going up earlier than usual because UKOGBNI time differences. (Two! Two! Two posts in one! Because I’m a lazy blogger.)
So: Happy Guy Fawkes Day, people! I’ve been waiting probably about six months to use this one.
Richard “Hamster” Hammond from 2005: “The Gunpowder Plot: Exploding the Legend”. In which Hammond not only talks about the gunpowder plot, but builds a replica of the House of Lords…and then blows it up.
I had a long day and a late night yesterday. I had videos queued up for Tuesday and I have stuff queued up for the Thursday holiday, but I didn’t manage to get anything enqueued for today.
So here’s two longish things, one of which bends the rules a little bit:
“Tubular Bells: The Mike Oldfield Story” from the BBC in 2013.
Bonus video: this is my rule bending one, as it is actually a noir movie, not non-fiction. Lawrence mentioned this last night, and I thought I’d throw it up here since I don’t see that he’s blogged about it. This is also kind of a bookmark for me: I might watch this once I’ve caught up on sleep.
“Inner Sanctum”, from 1948. It’s only 62 minutes long.
In addition to this being a somewhat well-regarded noir film, it also features the great SF/fantasy writer Fritz Leiber as “Dr. Valonius”. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, but are curious about Leiber, “Dr. Valonius” shows up almost immediately. (Edit: I was misinformed: the Fritz Leiber in “Inner Sanctum” is actually the writer’s father, not the writer.)
(See also. Affiliate link, but it delights me down to the bottom of my shriveled little coal black heart that a lot of this stuff is coming back in Kindle editions.)
Here’s a little slice of history for all of you “Emergency” fans out there: “Sirens In the Night”, a 1972 documentary about the Jacksonville Fire Department. Jacksonville was (according to the YouTube captions) the first fire department in the US to provide EMS services.
The Dallas Morning News is basically unreadable if you are not a subscriber, so I can’t link to that. According to the reports I’ve seen, Mr. Hassell died as a result of an apparent carjacking.
Nikki McKibbin. She finished third in the first round of “American Idol”.
Today, random. First up: “RMS Titanic: Fascinating Engineering Facts”. This actually talks about both Olympic and Titanic, and (unlike a lot of Titanic stuff) concentrates more on the engineering and shipbuilding: basically, how do you build and launch something that big?
This is only science adjacent, but I wanted to post this as a tribute: James Randi appears on “I’ve Got a Secret”.
And since that was only science adjacent, James Randi’s TED talk on homeopathy, quackery and fraud. I generally hesitate to link to TED talks, but this is an exception.
More Randi: this time, talking about Uri Geller and Geller’s “repudiation” of his claims to have psychic powers.
(As a side note, when Randi died, I got to wondering what Uri Geller was up to these days. I ran across this amusing bit from Geller’s Wikipedia entry.
Have you ever wondered, “How do they build those massive freaking mirrors for really big telescopes?” I’ve read some stuff about how the mirror for the Hale Telescope was built in the 1930s and 1940s, but today?
Finally: you’ve seen the footage. But do you know the engineering reason(s) why the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed?
I don’t know what I can say that hasn’t been better said by other people. Borepatch beat me on “The Wind and the Lion“. “The Untouchables”. “The Man Who Would Be King”.
Edited to add: “15 Sean Connery Movies to Stream” from the NYT. Which includes a couple of Bond films, a couple of movies I mentioned above, “The Hunt For Red October”, some other interesting stuff…
Sometime around 7:30 PM on November 18, 1987, somebody threw away a lit match or a burning cigarette butt or something on the escalator at King’s Cross Station in the London Underground. Whatever was burning fell between the wooden treads and apparently landed on something flammable. Later investigation revealed that the underside of the escalator was full of discarded trash, fluff, old grease, and other things that would burn easily.
The resulting fire seemed small and easily controlled. The London Fire Brigade was dispatched at 7:36 PM. The police started evacuating the station at 7:39 PM.
At 7:45 PM, the fire blew up into a flashover. 31 people died.
There was one man who was burned beyond recognition and who the authorities couldn’t identify. He became known as “Body 115”.
In 2004, the unknown man was finally identified as Alexander Fallon.
Body 115 and the King’s Cross fire fascinate me for two reasons. One is the amount of time and effort spent identifying the unknown man. The book is like a good non-fiction detective story, but with no real crime: just the search to put a name to an unknown man and maybe give his people some sense of…closure. It was an extraordinary, multiple organization effort spread across years.
I think sometimes you find people who view things with a certain exceptionalism. “Well, sure, we British would take 16 years to put a name to a unknown fire victim. Do you think they’d do that in America? They’re too busy chasing dope dealers with assault weapons.” Well, yes, actually: look up Little Miss 1565. Or the Boy in the Box. Or “Orange Socks“, to name some US specific examples.
I’m not saying the British or the Americans are superior. I’m saying I think this kind of thing happens in every country, and we don’t hear about most of them unless they grab the public’s imagination. I’m sure there are police officers in Japan or Germany trying to tie names to unknown bodies. Look at the work of EAAF, for another example.
The only exceptionalism involved here is the exceptionalism of being human, of wanting to find answers, solve mysteries, and comfort others.
The other reason King’s Cross fascinates me is the dynamics of the fire. Why did it suddenly go from “the size of a large cardboard box” and easily controllable to a massive flashover?
The Atomic Energy Research Establishment (which had a supercomputer) set up computer simulations of the fire at the request of the investigators. They found something strange: the fire actually laid down along the escalator treads, instead of burning straight up like they expected. The people who set up the simulation actually thought that their code was buggy: maybe they had gravity going the wrong way, or some mistake like that.
So the investigative teams built scale models of King’s Cross, set them on fire…and the fire behaved exactly like the simulation did. The flames laid down along the escalator. The metal sides of the escalator contained the heat and flames, and with the fire laying down on the escalator, it rapidly heated the wooden treads. The treads, under heat, started decomposing and giving off combustible gasses. At the same time, radiant heat directed upwards was heating layers of old paint above the escalator shaft. All of these things combined, but especially the “laying down” behavior of the fire, contributed to the flashover.
That phenomenon became known as the “trench effect“.
Bonus #1: this is an episode of “Seconds From Disaster” that covers the fire itself. It doesn’t spend a lot of time on Body 115, but it does give you a clear idea of what happened and the investigative process.
I thought today I’d post some stuff that I think is just pure fun.
South Texas Pistolero posted a few weeks ago about the Roy Clark Greatest Hits album, and then this popped up: Roy Clark and Johnny Cash play “Folsom Prison Blues”.
Something else that popped up: this excerpt from “The Seven Little Foys”, in which Bob Hope (as Eddie Foy) and James Cagney (as George M. Cohan) do a dance-off.
These two are obviously having so much fun – not just dancing, but playing off each other’s lines. I like this almost as much as I do the Nicholas Brothers routine from “Stormy Weather”. (And both men were in their fifties when this was filmed: that’s some darn fine dancing for men of that age.)
(Historical callback: Eddie Foy was backstage in the Iroquois Theatre preparing to perform when it caught fire. He famously ran out on stage and attempted to calm the crowd and keep them from panicking, even while chunks of burning scenery were falling near him. Foy was widely considered to be one of the heroes of the disaster. And this is dramatized in “The Seven Little Foys”.)
Bonus: I may be stretching other people’s definitions of “fun” here, but you know what I find fun? Advertising fiascos.
Once upon a time (the early 1980s) there was a chain called “Rax Roast Beef”. It was mostly based in the Northeast, but:
I find this guy kind of annoying (at least in the first 30 seconds or so) but the video is short: “The Commercial that Killed a Fast Food Chain”.
The Mr. Delicious promotional video:
Question: is this the worst fast food promotional campaign ever? The first guy seems to think so, but: was it worse than Herb?
Or The Noid?
Or – and I’m pretty sure Lawrence would argue that this is the worst fast food commercial of all time – the “singing” rat creatures for Quizno’s? That pretty much killed their company, too.