“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 210

October 26th, 2020

When I was a lad in school, we had to read excerpts from The Diary of Samuel Pepys. I didn’t like it much at the time. But now I’m an older person with more enjoyment of history, and I feel Pepys goes down much better when you read him as he intended to be read: in blog form.

And one thing I haven’t really addressed, even in a glancing oblique way, is the current crisis. No, the other one. No, the other other one.

Anyway, I know this is a little long, but there’s a shorter bonus video afterwards.

Bonus: from the same channel, but shorter, scientific, and even thematically appropriate for Halloween: “The Mystery of the Bog Mummies”.

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 26, 2020.

October 26th, 2020

Jerry Jeff Walker.

A waltzing ballad about an old street dancer Mr. Walker had met in a New Orleans drunk tank, “Mr. Bojangles” was first recorded by Mr. Walker for the Atco label in 1968. The song achieved its greatest success in a folk-rock version that reached the pop Top 10 in 1971 with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and went on to be covered by a wide range of artists, among them Nina Simone, Neil Diamond and even Bob Dylan. Sammy Davis Jr. included it in his stage show and performed it on television.

…

The song was by far Mr. Walker’s best-known composition, the only original of his — he typically performed songs written by others — to become a major hit. But perhaps his most enduring contribution to popular culture was as an architect of the so-called cosmic cowboy music scene that coalesced around Armadillo World Headquarters, an iconoclastic nightclub in Austin.
The reception Mr. Walker received in Austin, he often said, signaled the first time he felt truly validated as an artist. “Texas was the only place where they didn’t look at me like I was crazy,” he told Rolling Stone in 1974, referring to the freewheeling ethos he cultivated with fellow regulars at Armadillo World Headquarters like Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.
“It was the first place where, when I got on the stage to play, they said, ‘Of course, why not?’ Other places, they said, ‘Aw, you’re just another Bob Dylan, trying to make it with your guitar.’”

…

In a career that spanned six decades, Mr. Walker never had a Top 40 pop hit. But in his 1970s heyday, he and the Lost Gonzo Band, his loose-limbed group of backing musicians, made a number of definitive Texas outlaw recordings.
Foremost was “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” a boozing, brawling anthem written by Ray Wylie Hubbard that appeared on Mr. Walker’s 1973 album, “Viva Terlingua.”

“Viva Terlingua,” recorded live in Luckenbach, Texas, included other tracks that became signature recordings for Mr. Walker: among them are a dissolute take on Michael Martin Murphey’s “Backsliders Wine,” and “London Homesick Blues,” a tribute to Armadillo World Headquarters, written and sung by Gary P. Nunn of Mr. Walker’s band, with Mr. Walker on backing vocals. With a memorable refrain that began, “I wanna go home with the armadillo,” “London Homesick Blues” later became the theme song of the long-running PBS concert series “Austin City Limits.”

“The mid-’70s in Austin were the busiest, the craziest, the most vivid and intense and productive period of my life,” Mr. Walker wrote in his memoir.
“Greased by drugs and alcohol, I was also raising the pursuit of wildness and weirdness to a fine art,” he wrote. “I didn’t just burn the candle at both ends, I was also finding new ends to light.”

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 7, 2020.

October 26th, 2020

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

New York Jets

Next week, the 6-1 Chiefs.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 209

October 25th, 2020

Science Sunday!

My plan for today’s videos feel through because there was less science and more history in them than I really felt comfortable with for Science Sunday. So I moved those to Monday.

Instead, from MIT:

“The Sound of Gravity”, about LIGO and the search for gravity waves.

Bonus #1: “Editing Ourselves”, about CRISPER.

Bonus #2: Not by way of MIT, but a short video clip from “Cosmos”: Carl Sagan explains the 4th dimension.

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 208

October 24th, 2020

The Beverly Hills Supper Club fire was the third deadliest nightclub fire in the history of the United States.

What was the second deadliest?

I’m ashamed that I’ve never heard of this one: the Natchez Rhythm Club fire. 209 people died on April 23, 1940. It was the usual: the windows were boarded up to keep non-paying spectators from watching the performers, there were an estimated 746 people crowded into the building, and they’d decorated the place with Spanish moss strung on chicken wire…which was then sprayed with Flit.

This is a 30 minute documentary from 2012 called “The Rhythm Club Fire”.

Bonus #1 and #2: The only thing we learn from history is…that we learn nothing from history. Or, “Fire after fire, the lessons are the same…” The worst nightclub fire in US history took place on November 28, 1942. It was also the second-worst single-building fire in US history. I feel pretty confident that the vast majority of my readers have heard of this one: Cocoanut Grove.

It is estimated that, on that Saturday night, more than 1,000 Thanksgiving weekend revelers, wartime servicemen and their sweethearts, football fans, and others were crammed into a space rated for a maximum of 460 people.

…

Many patrons attempted to exit through the main entrance, the same way they had entered. The building’s main entrance was a single revolving door, which was rendered useless as the crowd stampeded in panic. Bodies piled up behind both sides of the revolving door, jamming it until it broke. The oxygen-hungry fire then leaped through the breach, incinerating whoever was left alive in the pile. Firemen had to douse the flames to approach the door. Later, after fire laws had tightened, it would become illegal to have only one revolving door as a main entrance without being flanked by outward opening doors with panic bar openers attached, or have the revolving doors set up so that the doors could fold against themselves in emergency situations.
Other avenues of escape were similarly useless; side doors had been bolted shut to prevent people from leaving without paying. A plate glass window, which could have been smashed for escape, was boarded up and unusable as an emergency exit. Other unlocked doors, like the ones in the Broadway Lounge, opened inwards, rendering them useless against the crush of people trying to escape. Fire officials would later testify that had the doors swung outwards, at least 300 lives could have been spared.

492 people died.

From the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA): “Cocoanut Grove Survivors Tell Their Stories”.

Also from the NFPA: “What we still don’t know about the Cocoanut Grove fire”.

Posted in History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 207

October 23rd, 2020

If it bends, it’s funny. If it breaks, it’s not funny.

So I’m bending the rules today. Really bending them. I’m posting two long videos, neither of which I have watched all the way through yet, and one of which is a “free with ads” documentary. As always, you are more than welcome to skip over today’s entry, or just read the linked articles if you prefer.

I could sit here and post gun related posts for the next 365 days, if I wanted to. But I like to break things up: military aviation one day, private/commercial aircraft another day, the occasional gun post, some food, Travel Thursday, Science Sunday…I just wanted to post something outside of normal and not creepy or horrifying or both today. I might go back to the disaster theme tomorrow, and then we’ll have Science Sunday. (Also, I want to bookmark these for myself.)

Today’s feature: “Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much”, a documentary about Ted Slauson.

“Ted who?” Ted Slauson is a man who spent a lot of time watching “The Price Is Right”, memorized the various price amounts (there was a fairly fixed rotation at the time) and, in 2008, was part of a “scandal” when he may (or may not) have helped a contestant place an exact bid on a showcase. Here’s a 2010 Esquire article if you’re one of those folks who prefers reading articles to watching documentaries.

Bonus: You can’t have a game show scandal without Michael Larson, who people may actually remember. (Well, you also can’t have a game show scandal without “Twenty-One”, but I’ve already covered Charles Van Doren and Herb Stempel.)

For those who don’t: Michael Larson was a guy with a VCR. He started taping episodes of the old “Press Your Luck” game show, and realized that the board wasn’t random: there were only five patterns, and Mr. Larson memorized them all. He knew where and when to stop to win big bucks and miss “whammies”. (If this doesn’t make any sense to you, you were not a child of the 1980’s, and don’t worry: the video demonstrates.)

Anyway, he flew to LA, managed to get on the show, and won $110,237. In inflation adjusted dollars, that’s still the largest amount ever won in one day on a game show. CBS had to break the episode into two thirty minute segments, because Larson’s run went on so long.

Wikipedia entry. “The Man Who Got No Whammies” from Priceonomics.

“Big Bucks: The ‘Press Your Luck’ Scandal”, originally from the Game Show Network.

Posted in History, TV | Comments Closed

Ask not for whom the (Blue) Bell tolls…

October 22nd, 2020

Shot:

Blue Bell releases two holiday flavors: Christmas Cookies and Peppermint

Chaser:

Ex-Blue Bell Creameries CEO charged in deadly listeria case

The former president of Blue Bell Creameries has been charged with wire fraud for allegedly trying to cover up a 2015 listeria outbreak linked to the company’s ice cream that killed three people in Kansas and sickened several others, federal prosecutors announced Wednesday.
A federal grand jury in Austin returned a seven-count indictment Tuesday charging Paul Kruse with six counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, according to a Justice Department statement.

(I like my Blue Bell. But they sure burned through a lot of goodwill with the whole listeria thing.)

Posted in Bagatelle, Food, Law | Comments Closed

Failure or fiasco?

October 22nd, 2020

I did want to make note of the shutting down of Quibi, which is probably getting more coverage than the service got in the seven months it was running.

The mobile streaming service offered entertainment and news programs in five- to 10-minute chunks intended to be watched on phones by people on the go, but it struggled to find an audience with everyone stuck inside their homes during the pandemic.

They didn’t even offer a desktop/TV option until two weeks ago, as I understand it. Someone on Reddit mentioned a couple of examples of Quibi’s content:

“Chrissy’s Court”, “an American comedic arbitration-based court show starring television personality and model Chrissy Teigen and her mother, Vilailuck “Pepper Thai” Teigen“.

“Dummy”, “…based on a real life experience between [Cody] Heller and her partner Dan Harmon, in which she discovered that he had a sex doll.” (“Cody Heller” was played by Anna Kendrick. “Dan Harmon” was played by “Donal Logue”.)

Okay, I’m not being 100% fair. They apparently had a remake of “The Fugitive” with Kiefer Sutherland (as a cop), and a version of “Most Dangerous Game“, among others.

I’m just amused that they managed to flush $2 billion down the drain and have nothing to show for it except a couple of minor Emmy awards. If I understand the stories I’ve read correctly, they don’t even have the rights to their content: the producers can go upload it to YouTube or sell it to some other channel, now that Quibi is gone.

Posted in Media | 2 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 206

October 22nd, 2020

Travel Thursday!

How about…America?

“Canyon Country”, from FoMoCo and 1954, visiting the Grand Canyon. This crosses Arizona off the list.

Bonus #1: “Pacific Paradise”, another Hawaii travel film from the 1960s. This is a Universal production, and I don’t think it is tied to any specific airline.

Bonus #2: I think this is stretching the travel theme just a little, but this is RoadRich bait: “Flight Plan”, a promo film for American Airlines showing how the airline develops flight plans. “There are no actors in this picture. Every one is an American Airlines employee working at his regular job.”

Posted in History, Travel | Comments Closed

James Randi.

October 22nd, 2020

He was 92. NYT. James Randi Educational Foundation.

The rest of Penn’s Twitter feed is worth reading, too. I love the lead of the NYT obit:

James Randi, a MacArthur award-winning magician who turned his formidable savvy to investigating claims of spoon bending, mind reading, fortunetelling, ghost whispering, water dowsing, faith healing, U.F.O. spotting and sundry varieties of bamboozlement, bunco, chicanery, flimflam, flummery, humbuggery, mountebankery, pettifoggery and out-and-out quacksalvery, as he quite often saw fit to call them, died on Tuesday at his home in Plantation, Fla. He was 92.

But in later years, Mr. Randi was not so much an illusionist as a disillusionist. Using a singular combination of reason, showmanship, constitutional cantankerousness and a profound knowledge of the weapons in the modern magician’s arsenal, he traveled the country exposing seers who did not see, healers who did not heal and many others.
Their methods, he often said, were available to any halfway adept student of conjuring — and ought to have been transparent to earlier investigators, who were sometimes taken in.
“These things used to be on the back of cornflakes boxes,” Mr. Randi, his voice italic with derision, once told the television interviewer Larry King. “But apparently some scientists either don’t eat cornflakes, or they don’t read the back of the box.”

…

Though his pursuit of Mr. Popoff was a consuming passion, Mr. Randi’s white whale was indisputably Mr. Geller, who had been famed since the 1970s for feats like bending keys and spoons, which he said he accomplished by telepathy.
Not so, said Mr. Randi, who explained that these were ordinary amusements, done by covertly bending the objects in advance.
In 1973, Mr. Geller made a disastrous appearance on “The Tonight Show” in which he was unable to summon his accustomed powers: On Mr. Randi’s advice, the show’s producers had supplied their own props and made sure Mr. Geller had no access to them beforehand.

…

Though he remained a dyed-in-the wool rationalist to the last, Mr. Randi did have a contingency plan for the hereafter, as he told New Times in 2009. “I want to be cremated,” he said. “And I want my ashes blown in Uri Geller’s eyes.”

The world is a smaller, colder, lesser place today.

Randi, responding to someone who compared psychic debunking to “the machine-gunning of butterflies”:

That writer never saw the distraught faces of parents whose children were caught up in some stupid cult that promises miracles. He never faced a man whose life savings had gone down the drain because a curse had to be lifted. He never held the hand of a woman at a dark seance who expected her loved one to come back to her as promised by a swindler who fed on her belief in nonsense. “Nothing is funnier…?” Tell that to the academics who lost their credibility by accepting the nonsense about telepathy that came out of the Stanford Research Institute. “The machine-gunning of butterflies?” Explain that to those whose spent their time and money trying to float in the air because a guru said they could. Are the “dangers of mass popular delusion” not “so menacing”? Mister, go dig up one of the 950 corpses of those who died in Guyana and shout in its face that Reverend Jim Jones was not dangerous.

—Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions

Posted in Geek, Magic, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 22nd, 2020.

October 22nd, 2020

It is going to be one of those two obit watches days, for reasons.

Marge Champion, of Marge and Gower Champion fame. She was 101.

Ms. Champion was a child of Hollywood, the daughter of a dance coach who taught her ballet, tap and the twirls, kicks and glorious sweeps of the ballroom. She performed at the Hollywood Bowl as a girl and as a teenager was a model for three Walt Disney animated features, her graceful moves transposed to the heroine of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), to the Blue Fairy that gave life to the puppet in “Pinocchio” (1940) and to the hippo ballerinas tripping lightly in tutus for “Dance of the Hours” in “Fantasia” (1940).
But her career came to little until 1947, when she and Gower Champion, a childhood friend, became partners both professionally and personally. In the next few years, they were pivotal in a transition from the escapist musicals of the Depression to an exuberant new age of postwar television, successors to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the first dance team to achieve national popularity through television.
The Champions did not possess the sheer magic of Astaire and Rogers or rival their stardom in Hollywood. But as television began to permeate American homes in 1949, they joined the weekly “Admiral Broadway Revue,” with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, on the Dumont and NBC networks, and delivered something new: narrative dances that sparkled with pantomime, satire, parody and touches of nostalgia.

…

As their audiences grew into the millions, Hollywood beckoned. The Champions played themselves in “Mr. Music” (1950), a light comedy with Bing Crosby about a sidetracked songwriter. In “Show Boat” (1951), with Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson, the Champions were members of the onboard troupe of entertainers and sang as well as danced. In “Lovely to Look At” (1952), a remake of “Roberta” also with Keel and Grayson, the Champions sang and danced a memorable number, “I Won’t Dance.” In their first roles with top billing, they played married dancers loosely based on themselves in “Everything I Have Is Yours” (1952).
The Champions radiated the vitality of young America, looking even in middle age like a couple of fresh-scrubbed teenagers. They were extraordinarily handsome — she a petite brunette with the blushing cheeks and sincere brown eyes of the girl next door; he a tall, slender letterman with a crew cut and a dreamboat face. They were in constant motion, swirling, dipping, leaping. John Crosby of The New York Herald Tribune called them “light as bubbles, wildly imaginative in choreography and infinitely meticulous in execution.”

Father John Vakulskas. No, you probably never heard of him. He was an ordained Catholic priest and spent 45 years in the Sioux City Diocese.

But his major ministry was to carnival workers.

Father Vakulskas was all of 25 and an assistant pastor in Le Mars, Iowa, when he received a call from a carnival owner’s wife. Her husband was seriously ill, and her frantic first impulse was to call a priest for help — because in the days before 911, as Father Vakulskas learned, few hospitals would send help for a carnival worker.
Father Vakulskas prevailed upon a doctor in town to visit the man, as Mr. Hanschen, of the Showmen’s League, noted in a speech in 2016, when Father Vakulskas was inducted into the organization’s Hall of Fame. The diagnosis was exhaustion, ptomaine poisoning and double pneumonia. (It had been a cold and rainy summer, and the man had been working around the clock.) The doctor ordered bed rest, the man recovered, and the couple proposed that Father Vakulskas begin a ministry for carnival people.
On his retirement in 2014 from the Sioux City Diocese, Father Vakulskas moved to Florida and served six parishes there.

…

Often clad in robes emblazoned with circus insignia, he baptized babies in fonts sometimes improvised from buckets or tubs, officiated at marriages and heard confessions from Catholics who were, in carnival parlance, copping a plea.
You didn’t have to be Catholic, though, to be welcomed by the man everyone learned to call Father John, a big, burly priest who embraced those of all faiths and of no faith at all. His work began mostly after midnight, when the crowds had left the midway, the lights had been dimmed and the growl of generators ruffled the silence.
“I’m just a common priest,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “It might sound schmaltzy, but I love families and the good times. But I’m there for the sorrows, too. To be accepted on the carnival fairground is a good indication that God is representative.”

…

Pope John Paul II — one of three popes to honor his work — appointed Father Vakulskas International Coordinator of Carnival Ministries in 1993.

And by the way:

He wrote his own obituary, and in it he noted that he was a licensed, instrument-rated airline pilot and an amateur radio operator, and that his passions included sailing, snow skiing, water skiing and cheering for the Chicago Cubs.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Religion, Theatre | 3 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 205

October 21st, 2020

I wanted to break up the disaster stuff a little bit. I planned to do a few more before Halloween, but I was trying to limit myself to one a week.

However, my window for this is rapidly closing, so I wanted to post these.

I’ve been reading a little about the late great Jean Shepherd, and I’ve written before about the 23rd Street fire, so when this popped up, I knew it was going in the feed: Jean Shepherd talks about the 23rd Street fire, and about firefighters.

Bonus #1: an interview with Joe D’Albert, one of the firefighters who was there that day.

Bonus #2: Haven’t had a chance to watch all of this yet, and it is longish, but: the “Fire Engineering” channel talks about 23rd Street.

10,000 firefighters lined Fifth Avenue on October 21, 1966, as ten firetrucks carried ten coffins to separate services at St. Thomas Protestant Episcopal Church and at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Firefighters came from as far away as the U.K., Anchorage, Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Northeast United States, and a group of 500 firefighters from Boston who had come to pay tribute.

Posted in History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 21, 2020.

October 21st, 2020

Spencer Davis, of the Spencer Davis Group.

Mr. Davis co-wrote “Gimme Some Lovin’,” his group’s biggest hit. He played rhythm guitar in the band and occasionally sang lead vocals, lending his baritone voice mostly to blues-oriented material.
But it was Mr. Winwood, who was only 15 when Mr. Davis discovered him, who emerged as the group’s star, singing lead on its hit singles and later becoming an essential figure in British rock through his work with the bands Traffic and Blind Faith and in a long solo career.
After Mr. Winwood abruptly left the Spencer Davis Group in 1967 to form Traffic, Mr. Davis kept the band going through multiple incarnations. In 1968, a new iteration of the Spencer Davis Group enjoyed two Top 40 hits in Britain, “Time Seller” and “Mr. Second Class.”
The band did not have similar success in the United States, but a song co-written by Mr. Davis and recorded by the band that year, “Don’t Want You No More,” became significant in 1969 when the Allman Brothers recorded a cover version as the opening track on their debut album.

Jon Gibson, minimalist saxophonist.

…best known as a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble from its founding in 1968 until last year. He participated in the first performances of watershed Glass works like “Music in Twelve Parts” and “Einstein on the Beach” and performed with Mr. Glass around the world until health problems prompted his departure in 2019. His mastery of circular breathing and other techniques made him a crucial asset to the development of Mr. Glass’s sound.
“His technical abilities were beyond what anyone else was able to do,” Mr. Glass said in a phone interview, “and he brought everyone else around him up to his level. He was very gentle with everyone, and very generous.” Without Mr. Gibson, Mr. Glass added, “the music wouldn’t have grown in a certain way that it could grow.”
Mr. Gibson collaborated as well with the other three composers now recognized for establishing Minimalist music in the United States: He participated in the world premieres of Terry Riley’s “In C” and Steve Reich’s “Drumming,” and he was briefly a member of La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music. An inveterate and eager collaborator, Mr. Gibson also worked with composers who had little or no connection to Minimalism, including Christian Wolff, Robert Ashley and Annea Lockwood.
As a composer, he pursued a panoramic span of disciplines, from unaccompanied saxophone performance and tape collage to fully staged opera. His most ambitious creations include “Voyage of the Beagle,” a music theater piece about Charles Darwin, which Mr. Gibson created with the director JoAnne Akalaitis from 1983 to 1987; and “Violet Fire,” an opera about the inventor Nikola Tesla, which was introduced in Belgrade in 2006 and staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the same year.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 204

October 20th, 2020

The plan for today’s video went out the window because I watched the video I was thinking about using. I won’t name it here, but it was from a channel I don’t usually watch, and was about a subject I thought would be amusing. Unfortunately, it turned out to be kind of draggy and more boring than I expected.

So, instead, I thought I’d fall back to some actual history today. I finished listening to “The History of Rome” a few weeks ago, and vacillated for a while about subscribing to “Revolutions“. Not because I didn’t like “The History of Rome”: I thoroughly enjoyed it, and commend it to your attention. But having cleared out my backlog of one podcast, did I want to immediately start a backlog of another podcast?

In the end, I decided “yes” because Mike Duncan is currently covering the Russian revolutions (1905 and 1917), he’s taking an extended break between 1905 and 1917 to work on his new book (Citizen Lafayette, which I don’t see listed on Amazon yet), and he’s announced that he is wrapping up “Revolutions” after the Russian revolutions are done. So like “The History of Rome”, there’s a defined limit, and I have time to catch up. Plus there’s structure to “Revolutions” that allows me to listen in blocks of episodes, rather than crunching through from episode 1 to the end.

Anyway, Mr. Duncan recommended these two videos in episode 10.35, and I liked them enough to feature here, even if they are a bit long. I find Drachinifel kind of funny: almost like a good stand-up comedian.

It helps that, in this first video, he’s got naturally funny material to work with: the Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron. Or, as he refers to it, “Voyage of the Damned”, one of the most messed up operations in naval history. Start with the decision to send the fleet on an 18,000 mile voyage with no friendly naval bases for resupply and refueling. Add in the fact that many of the ships in the fleet weren’t designed for operations in this environment, and were rather dated. Then add in the fact that many of the officers were incompetent drunks, and the crews lacked experience.

As one officer put it “One Half of this lot needed to be taught everything, because they know nothing. and the other half also needed to learn everything, because they had forgotten everything.”

Hilarity ensued. The 2nd Pacific Squadron nearly started a war with the United Kingdom, narrowly managed to avoid some other incidents because their gunnery was incompetent (and they didn’t have enough ammunition loaded for practice), turned their ships into a zoo (complete with a poisonous snake that bit an officer) and an opium den, and the list goes on. I think this is one of those historical moments that justifies the use of the word “fiasco“.

Bonus #1: Unfortunately, the punchline to the voyage of the dammed isn’t quite as funny: the Battle of Tsushima. In which, having sailed 18,000 miles, the 2nd Pacific Squadron confronts the Japanese navy…and gets slaughtered.

Total Russian personnel losses were 216 officers and 4,614 men killed; with 278 officers and 5,629 men taken as Prisoner Of War (POW). Interned in neutral ports were 79 officers and 1,783 men. Escaping to Vladivostok and Diego-Suarez were 62 officers and 1,165 men. Japanese personnel losses were 117 officers and men killed and 583 officers and men wounded.

Bonus #2: this one is much shorter, and specifically covers the Kamchatka. Or, as Drachinifel refers to it, “the curse of the Russian fleet”.

Posted in History, Ships | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 203

October 19th, 2020

I’m not great about Halloween.

Lawrence, as a SF/fantasy/horror collector and writer, is more familiar with the highways and byways of the genre than I am. The things that tend to horrify me are the ugly realities of existence, so I leave October mostly to him.

But this channel popped up in my YouTube recs, and I thought it might be interesting to highlight these two kind of scary events from the “Fascinating Horror” channel. There are a lot of people I don’t link because I honestly can’t stand their voices, and this guy is right on the edge for me, but I think these have some enough historical value to where I can put up with the narration.

First up: “Disaster on Webb’s Bait Farm”. This one I was unfamiliar with.

On May 27, 1983, there was a massive explosion at a place called Webb’s Bait Farm, near Benton, Tennessee. Eleven people were killed in the blast.

The force of the blast shattered windows in several homes and other structures on nearby properties, which reportedly resulted in some neighbors receiving minor cut wounds. Parts of bodies were hurled through the roofs of the nearby house and carport and as far away as 500 feet (150 m; 170 yd) from the site. Nothing in the barn was left intact; all of the bodies had lost limbs and six were decapitated. Some were stripped by the force of the blast.
Several witnesses claimed to have seen a white mushroom cloud which was estimated to be 600 to 800 feet (180 to 240 m) tall, and the blast was heard and felt in Cleveland over 20 miles (32 km) away.

Now, Webb’s Bait Farm was a place that raised and sold worms for fishing. You’re probably thinking “What could possibly explode with that much force at a bait farm?”

Could it have been…meth?

Spoiler for those of you who didn’t follow the link above: it wasn’t meth.

Bonus #1: this is a disaster I’ve actually heard of (I think I was visiting my grandparents in Cleveland when this happened), but which seems to have been forgotten by many people: “The Beverly Hills Supper Club”.

Bonus #2 and #3: Here are two shorter videos from local news channels about the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire.

Wikipedia entry. The general consensus of opinion seems to be that this was a combined parade of failure and gaps in oversight, but there also seems to be a strongly held minority opinion that the Mafia actually started the fire.

Bonus #4: a documentary from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) on Beverly Hills.

“Fire after fire, the lessons are the same…” I remember watching an episode of “Nova” about building fires. One of the people being interviewed commented that, in the profession, they considered NFPA’s Life Safety Code to be a holy book: every word in it was written in the blood of someone who died or was badly injured.

Posted in History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 19, 2020.

October 19th, 2020

Rhonda Fleming.

She had a heck of a career, going from “Out of the Past” to “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” to “The Nude Bomb” and “Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood”. Never did a “Mannix”, but she did do some Western series, “Police Woman”, “McMillan and Wife”, and “Search”.

(“Search” is apparently available from Amazon as a slightly pricey DVD set. I think it’s print-on-demand, but can’t tell from the listing. I may have to pick this up: on the one hand, it isn’t like we don’t already have enough TV series to watch on Saturday nights. But on the other hand, “Search” only had 23 episodes.)

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 6, 2020.

October 19th, 2020

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

New York Jets

Down to one team after six weeks. I thought this was fairly rare, but it actually happened in 2016. And in 2015 and 2012, we had no losers at this point in the season.

Are the Jests bad enough to pull this off? My optimism is fading.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | 2 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 202

October 18th, 2020

Science Sunday!

Today: a pretty high quality documentary from Rolex, “The Trieste’s Deepest Dive”, about the 1960 descent by Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh (US Navy) to the bottom of the Challenger Deep.

I actually have a copy of Seven Miles Down: I kept it next to my copy of Half Mile Down because of course I did.

As best as I can tell, Lt. Walsh is still alive.

In June, 2020, Walsh’s son Kelly dove to the bottom of Challenger Deep with [Victor] Vescovo, becoming the twelfth person to reach the deepest point in the ocean.

Bonus: As far as I’m concerned, archaeology is science. “Jamestown Rediscovery…a world uncovered”. Hosted by Roger Mudd.

Posted in Books, Geek, History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 201

October 17th, 2020

The plan for today’s videos went out the window because NFL Films is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

So how aboot (see what I did there?) some true crime stories from Canada? Specifically, from “The Fifth Estate” channel on YouTube. My impression is that “The Fifth Estate” is kind of like a Canadian “60 Minutes”.

I actually watched this one many years ago on the hotel television when I was visiting Vancouver. (I didn’t go up there to watch TV: I got back to the hotel late, turned on the TV, ran through the channels, and found this). I had not heard of the “Squamish Five” before, and I think it is a rather interesting story.

If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, I would encourage you to at least fast forward to about 20 minutes in: a man who was standing right next to the Litton Industries bomb details his injuries. “I had a half a brick embedded in my back. And that half a brick that was embedded in my back was embedded solidly because four pounds of muscle had been blown out of my back…”

Bonus #1: “Bad Day at Barhead”. This is another interesting, and more recent story, that I was appalled I had not heard of. On March 3, 2005, the RCMP was executing a search warrant on a farm near Mayerthorpe, Alberta. The owner of the farm (who had fled earlier in the day) returned to the farm and killed four RCMP officers: Anthony Gordon, Leo Johnston, Brock Myrol, and Peter Schiemann. This was the second worst loss of life in one day for the RCMP. (Five officers drowned in a 1958 incident.)

Bonus #2: Just one more, because I’m also fascinated by the Quebec biker war. “Walk the Line” about Benoit Roberge. He was a prominent investigator of biker gangs for the RCMP. Turns out he was also on the Hells Angels payroll.

According to Wikipedia, Roberge pled guilty in 2014 to “breach of trust” and “engaging in gangsterism”, and admitted accepting $125,000 from the Hells Angels. He was sentenced to eight years in prison. He was paroled in 2017.

Posted in History, Law | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 200

October 16th, 2020

Today, a SCAT video.

No, this isn’t German. SCAT in this case is “Submarine Classification and Tracking”. According to the YouTube notes, this was a proposed system that involved “a mechanical noisemaker affixed to large magnets which, when it attached to the hull of a moving submarine, generated noise that allowed the sub to be easily tracked“. This was never deployed, since there were…shall we say, practical issues with attaching mechanical noisemakers with magnets to moving submarines.

But we do have this vintage 1960s video:

Bonus: “To Catch a Shadow”, more anti-submarine warfare propaganda, featuring the P-3 Orion.

Posted in History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 199

October 15th, 2020

Travel Thursday!

Today: “High Road to the Orient”, from Northwest Orient sometime in the 1950s.

Bonus: The “I Will Always Travel For Food” channel takes the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto…and eats along the way.

Posted in Food, History, Travel | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 15, 2020.

October 15th, 2020

Erin Wall.

She was a soprano.

Lyric Opera [of Chicago] was an artistic home base for Ms. Wall, who received her professional start as a member of the company’s prestigious young artist program, now known as the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center. Chicago was the site of the dramatic season-opening performance that jolted her nascent career in 2004, when she jumped in with just a few hours’ notice to replace an ill colleague as Donna Anna in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”

…

From Rice, she entered Lyric Opera’s young artist program in 2001. She swiftly established herself as a rising talent: a lyric soprano with a full-bodied yet agile voice and dazzling facility in her top register. It was an instrument ideal for youthful roles like Marguerite in Gounod’s “Faust,” which she sang in Chicago in 2003, as well as Mozart’s Donna Anna, Pamina (in “The Magic Flute”) and Konstanze (in “The Abduction From the Seraglio”).
“The voice definitely evolved,” Michael Benchetrit, Ms. Wall’s manager, said in an interview. “The middle and lower parts became richer with time.”
This evolution came as she increasingly took on Strauss roles that benefited from more tonal opulence, like Arabella, Chrysothemis (in “Elektra”) and Daphne. When she starred in “Daphne” at the Santa Fe Opera in 2007, Mr. Benchetrit said, the effect was overwhelming.

…

Ms. Wall made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 2009, as Donna Anna. She returned as Helena in Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 2013 and Arabella in 2014. Though acclaimed in staged opera, she concentrated more of her time on concert work, in pieces like Strauss’s “Four Last Songs,” Britten’s “War Requiem,” Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and, especially, Mahler’s mighty choral Eighth Symphony, in which she was captured on several recordings.
She was a frequent partner of prominent conductors, including Donald Runnicles, Christoph Eschenbach, Michael Tilson Thomas, Andris Nelsons and, perhaps most notably, Mr. [Andrew] Davis [Lyric Opera’s music director – DB]. Earlier this year, he and Ms. Wall released a recording of Massenet’s “Thaïs,” an opera they also performed together in concert at the Edinburgh Festival in 2011.

She was only 44 years old. Cancer got her.

Posted in Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 198

October 14th, 2020

I thought today, for a change of pace, I’d make everyone hungry.

Chicken Chasseur, or “Hunter’s Chicken”.

Bonus #1: Bigos, or “Polish Hunter’s Stew”.

Bonus #2: This is longer, but it pushes another of my hot buttons (other than food), arctic exploration. “The Food Of Prince Philip’s Arctic Expedition” from the Real Royalty channel. (The arctic expedition part is early on, if you don’t want to watch the whole thing.)

Posted in Food, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 14, 2020.

October 14th, 2020

Conchata Ferrell.

Yes, yes, “Two and a Half Men”, but she did a lot of other work too.

Ms. Ferrell had achieved acclaim decades earlier in New York theater, appearing as the prostitute April in Lanford Wilson’s “The Hot L Baltimore” (1973), a role he wrote for her. The play won multiple awards, including an Obie for best Off Broadway play, and ran for three years.
Ms. Ferrell collected her own Off Broadway prizes, including the Drama Desk Award for best actress in a play and an Obie, for her performance as a disillusioned waterfront-bar owner in “The Sea Horse” (1973).
She received her first Emmy nomination in 1992 for a recurring role as Susan Bloom, a ruthless entertainment lawyer with more money than manners, on “L.A. Law.”
She later said the three favorite characters she had played were Berta, April and Susan Bloom. What they had in common, she said in a 2018 interview with The Huntington Quarterly, a West Virginia magazine, was “a zest for living life to the fullest in the best way available to them.”

…

She notably played the judge who refused to annul Ross and Rachel’s Las Vegas marriage on “Friends” (1999). But she often went dramatic too, playing a homesteader’s wife in the 1979 movie “Heartland” and appearing on series including “Knots Landing,” “Lou Grant” and “Touched by an Angel.” In a 1986 television version (and Los Angeles stage version) of William Inge’s heart-wrenching drama “Picnic,” she played the kind widow who hires a dangerous drifter.
Ms. Ferrell also had small roles in big movies, including “Network” (1976), as a television executive appalled by Faye Dunaway’s series ideas, and “Edward Scissorhands” (1990), as a neighborhood lady in pink hair rollers. She starred as a pizzeria owner in “Mystic Pizza” (1988), with a cast that included a young Julia Roberts. The two reunited in “Erin Brockovich” (2000), with Ms. Ferrell as Albert Finney’s secretary.

She never did a “Mannix”, but she did appear on “The Rockford Files” and “Quincy, M.E”, and had a recurring role as “The Fox” on both “B.J. and the Bear” and “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, along with a bunch of other guest shots.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 197

October 13th, 2020

Back in the day (1960-1961) there was a series that ran on ABC, “The Valiant Years”.

…based on the memoirs of Winston Churchill, directed by Anthony Bushell and John Schlesinger, narrated by Gary Merrill and with extracts from the memoirs voiced by Richard Burton.

Here’s episode 7, “Struggle At Sea”, about the sinking of the Hood and the Bismarck.

Bonus #1: Here’s a time lapse video from “The Operations Room” detailing the hunt for the Bismarck.

Bonus #2: I couldn’t pass this up.

Posted in History | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »