This is not something I regularly get a chance to cover, especially since 2020. So when it comes up, I can’t help but make note of it.
The NYPost article includes concept art for some of their other proposed, but never completed, projects for NYC.
Short art, damn it! Art! watch.
February 18th, 2025Obit watch: February 17, 2025.
February 17th, 2025Eleanor Maguire passed away in early January. She was 54. Cancer got her.
I think this is a fascinating obit. She was a cognitive neuroscientist who did a lot of early and influential work using MRI scanning to study the brain, especially the hippocampus.
Her studies revealed that the hippocampus can grow, and that memory is not a replay of the past but rather an active reconstructive process that shapes how people imagine the future.
“She was absolutely one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world on memory,” Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London, said in an interview. “She changed our understanding of memory, and I think she also gave us important new ways of studying it.”
She was watching TV one night and came across “The Knowledge“, about London taxi drivers and their qualifying exams. (That’s a rabbit hole worth going down if you’re unfamiliar with it.)
In the first of a series of studies, Dr. Maguire and her colleagues scanned the brains of taxi drivers while quizzing them about the shortest routes between various destinations in London.
The results, published in 1997, showed that blood flow in the right hippocampus increased sharply as the drivers described their routes — meaning that specific area of the brain played a key role in spatial navigation.
But that didn’t solve the mystery of why the taxi drivers were so good at their jobs.
Dr. Maguire kept digging. Using M.R.I. machines, she measured different regions in the brains of 16 drivers, comparing their dimensions with those in the brains of people who weren’t taxi drivers.
“The posterior hippocampi of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control subjects,” she wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the size, she found, correlated with the length of a cabby’s career: The longer the cabby had driven, the bigger the hippocampus.
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She followed up with other studies. One showed that the hippocampi of bus drivers — whose routes were set rather than navigated from memory — didn’t grow. Another showed that prospective taxi drivers who failed their tests did not gain any hippocampus volume in the process.
The implications were striking: The key structure in the brain governing memory and spatial navigation was malleable.
In a roundabout way, Dr. Maguire’s findings revealed the scientific underpinnings of the ancient Roman “method of loci,” a memorization trick also known as the “memory palace.”
This technique involves visualizing a large house and assigning an individual memory to a particular room. Mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, eliciting the memorized information. Dr. Maguire studied memory athletes — people who train their brains to memorize vast amounts of information quickly — who used this method, and observed that its effectiveness was “reflected in its continued use over two and a half millennia in virtually unchanged form.”
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In studying patients with damage to the hippocampus, including those with amnesia, Dr. Maguire found that they couldn’t visualize or navigate future scenarios. One taxi driver, for instance, struggled to make his way through busy London streets in a virtual-reality simulation. Other amnesiacs couldn’t imagine an upcoming Christmas party or a trip to the beach.
“Instead of visualizing a single scene in their mind, such as a crowded beach filled with sunbathers, the patients reported seeing just a collection of disjointed images, such as sand, water, people and beach towels,” the journal Science News reported in 2009.
The hippocampus, it turns out, binds snippets of information to construct scenes from the past — and the future.
Jim Guy Tucker, former governor of Arkansas. You may remember him from such hits as Whitewater.
He had been among the most promising figures in Arkansas politics and a rival to Mr. Clinton in Arkansas’s Democratic Party. But he was forced to resign as governor in July 1996, after serving less than two years of his term.
Two months earlier, he had been convicted in a federal court in Little Rock. He had been prosecuted by independent counsel, a team led by Kenneth W. Starr, for receiving a fraudulent loan from a small business development company, Capital Management Services, in the mid-1980s.
In August 1996, Judge George Howard Jr. of Federal District Court in Little Rock sentenced him to four years’ probation — Mr. Tucker avoided jail because of testimony about a serious health condition — and ordered him to pay $294,000 in restitution to the Small Business Administration. By then Mr. Tucker had already quit the governor’s mansion; he would never hold office again.
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The loan — for $150,000, according to the historian Jeannie M. Whayne of the University of Arkansas — should never have gone to Mr. Tucker’s water and sewer services company. Other sources say nearly $3 million was lent to Mr. Tucker and his co-defendants, James B. and Susan McDougal, who were also convicted in May 1996.
Capital Management Services “was supposed to make loans to companies where at least half the owners were ‘disadvantaged’ in some way,” the veteran Arkansas journalist Ernie Dumas, described as the dean of the Arkansas political press corps by the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, wrote in an unpublished manuscript.
But David Hale, the banker who ran Capital Management Services and was the key witness for Mr. Starr’s prosecution team, “never told any of his borrowers that, and few, if any, of them would have qualified,” Mr. Dumas wrote. “Tucker and the McDougals learned of the special designation, for disadvantaged people, at the trial.”
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At the end of 1996 he received a liver transplant, which he credited with saving his life. Two years later, Mr. Starr was after him again, and Mr. Tucker pleaded guilty to tax fraud “to avoid going to prison,” Mr. Dumas wrote.
“The Justice Department and the I.R.S. eventually acknowledged that Starr had charged Tucker with violating a section of the federal bankruptcy code that did not even exist at the time of a cable-television transaction in the 1980s,” Mr. Dumas added. “The government eventually concluded that it might owe Tucker money but could not discern how much. It sent him and his wife a check for $1.44, which he framed and put on his wall.”
Ron Travisano, noted advertising guy.
FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Kevin Lacey, “pilot, philanthropist, businessman and Discovery Channel character”. He was part of the cast of “Airplane Repo”.
Rich met him a few times at fly-ins (and sent over a photo, which I don’t have his permission to reproduce here), and says he was a really down-to-earth guy with a lot of stories. As Rich put it, he was the kind of person you could just walk up and talk to.
Back on the gun book train…
February 13th, 2025…with one oddity that’s not really a gun book.
This was bought in one lot from Callahan and Company, so there was $8 shipping on top of these prices.
The jump goes here…
Obit watch: February 10, 2025.
February 10th, 2025You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#142 in a series)
February 7th, 2025Information about this one has been hard to find. Mike the Musicologist sent me a press release from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the stories I turned up in Internet searches seem to be lightly rewritten from that.
Pearson, Georgia is a small town, with a population of 1,821 per the 2020 census. Robert “Buster” Johnson is the mayor.
“Buster” was busted yesterday.
I’m just going to quote the list of charges here:
- Criminal Attempt to Commit Hindering or Apprehension or Punishment of Criminal
- 3 counts of Influencing Witnesses
- Criminal Solicitation to Commit False Statements and Writings
- Criminal Solicitation to Commit False Official Certificates or Writings by Officers or Employees of a State and Political Subdivision
- 2 counts of False Statements and Writings
- Criminal Attempt to Commit Theft by Taking
- Conspiracy in Restraint of Free and Open Competition
- 4 counts of Conspiracy to Defraud State and Political Subdivision
- Theft by Deception
- 3 counts of Bribery
- 2 counts of Theft by Taking
- Fraud, Forgery, and Theft in Connection with Registration of Title to Land
- Filing False Documents
- 4 counts of Violation of Oath of Office by Public Officer
Go big or go home, you know? Also, “Violation of Oath of Office by Public Officer”? Didn’t know that was a crime in Georgia, or anywhere else, but I fully support the existence of this as a criminal charge.
So what the heck happened? As I said previously, details are hard to come by, but the GBI press release says:
Here’s a story from WALB, which doesn’t add much, except that some folks don’t like Buster.
Bagatelle (#126).
February 7th, 2025I don’t know how many of my readers are familiar with the story of “The Man Who Rode The Thunder”, Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin.
I know Lawrence is, because we’ve talked about it before. FotB RoadRich may know the story as well.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, here’s a good brief overview from Dr. Dabbs. Elevator pitch: LTC Rankin was forced to bail out of his F-8 Crusader…into a thunderstorm.
I have a paperback copy of The Man Who Rode the Thunder in a box somewhere, but I don’t remember it being in my elementary school library. If it had been, I would have been all over that like flies on a severed cow’s head in a Damien Hirst installation.
Obit watch: February 6, 2025.
February 6th, 2025In honor of Valérie André, I am declaring a moratorium on French and French Army jokes for the next 72 hours.
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In 120 combat missions in the early 1950s in the dense jungles and soggy rice paddies of Indochina, where the French were trying without success to repulse Communist guerrillas, Dr. André flew 168 wounded soldiers from the battlefields to hospitals in Hanoi — including enemy soldiers, when there was room on the two litters mounted on her single-seat Hiller chopper.
She later flew 365 missions into combat zones in North Africa, where Algerians were seeking independence from France. In 1976 she was promoted to general, the first woman to be elevated to that rank in the French Army.
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She was 102 when she died.
Obit watch: February 5, 2024.
February 5th, 2025Lieutenant Colonel Harry Stewart Jr. (USAF – ret) has passed away. He was 100.
He was one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen who saw combat during WWII. (That’s the way the paper of record phrases it. I wondered about that phrasing, but according to Wikipedia (I know, I know):
He flew 43 missions — almost one every other day — from late winter 1944 into the spring of 1945.
On one mission, to attack a Luftwaffe base in Germany, Lieutenant Stewart and six other American pilots were baited into a dogfight with at least 16 German fighter planes. Firing his machine guns and performing risky aerial maneuvers, he downed three enemy aircraft in succession, fending off a potential rout.
He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, cited for having “gallantly engaged, fought and defeated the enemy” with no regard for his personal safety.
Prince Karim Al-Hussaini, also known as The Aga Khan IV.
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Obit watch: February 3, 2025.
February 3rd, 2025Fay Vincent, former MLB commissioner. ESPN.
“List of people banned from Major League Baseball“.
Merle Louise Simon, who worked extensively with Stephen Sondheim.
Ms. Simon — who worked for most of her career under the name Merle Louise — began her run in Sondheim shows with “Gypsy,” in 1959, and continued with “Company” (1970), “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (1979) and “Into the Woods” (1987), Mr. Sondheim and James Lapine’s interpretation of fairy tales. (Mr. Sondheim wrote the lyrics for “Gypsy,” and the music and lyrics for the other shows.)
“Steve had a real history with Merle,” Mr. Lapine, who directed Ms. Simon in three roles, including the Giant in “Into the Woods,” said in an email. Mr. Sondheim, he added, “loved the energy she brought to the rehearsal room and the stage. Merle was usually the smallest person in the room but always the most ebullient and with the most glorious voice.”
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Hey! New York Times! Spoilers!
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She became “Reagan’s window on the Soviet Union,” the historian James Mann wrote in “The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan” (2009), a study of his role in ending the Cold War. “She described the country and the Russian people to the president in terms that he understood and found useful.”
It was Ms. Massie who taught Mr. Reagan the Russian proverb “Doveryai no proveryai” (“Trust but verify”), which he uttered to Mr. Gorbachev when they met in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986 — and repeated so often that Mr. Gorbachev grumbled about it.
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Although Ms. Massie corresponded with Mr. Reagan and met with him before and after trips she made to Moscow — including a private lunch on the Oval Office patio with the president and the first lady, Nancy Reagan — memoirs by Reagan officials involved in U.S.-Soviet relations portray her as a minor figure.
But Mr. Mann wrote that she “played a more significant role” than is generally known. She served as an unofficial emissary, carrying messages between Mr. Reagan and Moscow, and she humanized Russians for Mr. Reagan at a time when he was revising his view of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and reaching out to Mr. Gorbachev to ease nuclear tensions.
She was married to Robert K. Massie.
The couple’s first child, Robert, had hemophilia. Caring for him, which the Massies described in a searing memoir, “Journey” (1975), turned out to be an unlikely portal into Russian culture and, ultimately, the Oval Office.
The Massies learned that Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, the last of the Romanovs, had a son with hemophilia. Mr. Massie went on to write a best-selling history, “Nicholas and Alexandra” (1967), with Ms. Massie serving as editor and researcher. Seeking some respite from raising a disabled child, she took Russian lessons.
After their divorce, she married Seymour Papert.
James Carlos Blake, one of those authors I have heard of but have not read. The NYT compares him to Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry.
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Well, that was easy.
January 31st, 2025The updates to the list of US Congressional representatives for Texas have been completed.
Please let me know if you find any issues with the list.
Quick preview of coming attractions (also relevant to Lawrence’s interests).
January 31st, 2025I do intend to resume gun book blogging (and random gun crankery) soon.
Right now, I’m trying to finish the updates to the list of Texas congressional representatives. I’m about 1/3rd of the way through, and hope to have that done by the end of the weekend.
In the meantime, I thought I’d put up a quick post that’s sort of gun book related. Lawrence gets a fair number of possums in his yard. Or maybe just one possum, over and over again, that his dog keeps cornering. I don’t know for sure. I haven’t checked the serial numbers on his possums.
Anyway, I thought I’d throw this up as a preview from a forthcoming book: a recipe for “possum sausages”. I do think my use of this limited excerpt from How Wild Things Are by Analiese Gregory counts as “fair use”.
(Click to embiggen.)
One thing I do want to point out, though: Lawrence’s possums are the “Virginia opossum” (order Didelphimorphia). The possums the author is describing here are the “common brushtail possum” (order Diprotodontia), which are considered invasive in Tasmania. I suspect with enough pork back fat stuffed in, either one tastes good. Especially if you follow the recommended process of caging your possum for two weeks and feeding it fruit and veggies to reduce the “gamey” taste.
I do not know if the differences between Didelphimorphia and Diprotodontia make a difference to the cooking time or the taste of the possum sausage. I have not tried this recipe yet. (We don’t have a sausage/meat grinder. We do have a Kitchenaid stand mixer, but I would never buy the sausage stuffer attachment for it, as reliable sources say that is a POS.)
Obit watch: January 31, 2025.
January 31st, 2025Dick Button, figure skating guy. I’ve never been a big skating fan, but I remember Mr. Button from when I was young and actually watched some of the Olympics.
Iris Cummings Critchell. She was 104.
She competed as a swimmer in the 1936 Summer Olympics, and was the last surviving member of the American team.
She flew with the Woman’s Air Force Service Pilots, ferrying planes across the country for shipping overseas.
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In addition to her work at Harvey Mudd College, Ms. Critchell created aviation outreach programs for public high schools, developed manuals for the Federal Aviation Administration and worked as a pilot examiner there for more than 20 years. She was a longtime member of the Ninety-Nines, a nonprofit organization supporting female pilots.
She also competed in women’s transcontinental air races, known informally as the Powder Puff Derby, a term coined by Will Rogers. In 1957, she finished first in a race to Philadelphia from San Mateo, Calif., sharing an $800 prize with her co-pilot, Alice Roberts.
This flaming hyena goes to 11.
January 30th, 2025Obit watch: January 28, 2025.
January 28th, 2025The California Historical Society.
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I think that would have been a very cool thing to tour. But I understand the cost.
It might have been smarter to build a dedicated historical museum in some place like the state capital. But that’s just my opinion.
In 2022, Gonzalez said, the group requested a one-time grant of $12 million to support a partnership with the University of California, Riverside, which would have involved collaborating with Native American tribes to bring historical projects to underserved parts of the state.
The request was rejected. “The legislature gave us the same answer we heard from philanthropic organizations: This sounds like something a university should be doing,” Gonzalez said.
Wait, wait: the California legislature rejected a proposal to spend taxpayer money?
This actually makes me kind of sad. I like state historical societies, and I hate to see one fall apart like this.
But: their collections and archives are being transferred to Stanford University. I guess the school is now the de facto historical society, and that may not be such a bad thing overall.
Update 2.
January 28th, 2025The Travis County commissioners list has been updated.
I also made some minor tweaks to the list of US Senators from Texas.
We apologize for the convenience.