Heading home. It will be a long day of driving. Expect blogging to resume sometime tomorrow.
Travel day.
October 4th, 2021Your loser update: week 4, 2021.
October 3rd, 2021NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Detroit
Jacksonville
So as soon as I call out both New York teams, both of them win – in overtime, no less.
Always bet against my picks. I guess that’s the moral here.
Lawrence made a point to me the other day that I had totally missed: Jacksonville is now on a 19 game losing streak. They’re playing Tennessee next week, so it isn’t impossible that they’ll run the streak to 20. The only other teams that have lost 20 straight games are the 1942-1945 Chicago Cardinals (29 straight) and the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers (26 straight).
More adventures in hoplobibliophila.
October 3rd, 2021The Smith and Wesson Collector’s Association Symposium has wrapped up.
I thought I’d stay over a day, relax, and kick around a bit. Unfortunately, a lot of the places I’d like to kick around are closed on Sundays. But my loss is your gain. At least if you like gun books.
Pistol and Revolver Shooting by Walter F. Roper. The colophon lists it as Macmillan, 1945, and “First Printing”, but the “Olympic Edition” on the cover makes me wonder. Maybe first printing in this edition?
Mr. Roper was a prominent gun guy and gun experimenter: here’s a short article by John Taffin from Guns magazine about him. Purchased for $40 from a fellow collector at the Symposium.
I would have sworn great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl Rehn of KR Training had reviewed this book on his blog. But if he did, I can’t find the review now.
Two of a perfect pair:
(Previously on Experiments of a Handgunner.)
I do have a copy of what I believe is Mr. Roper’s only other book, Smith and Wesson Hand Guns (with Roy McHenry) but I didn’t bring it on the road with me, and my copy is a reprint anyway.
Not exactly a gun book, but worth noting, in my humble opinion:
Smith and Wesson ties, tie bar, and tie pin. The tie bar and pin were purchased from one collector, the ties were purchased from another. I think they add that subtle touch of class when I’m wearing a suit. And I paid $25 for both ties (and another $10 for the bar and pin).
There was another very classy S&W tie in the auction on Saturday: sadly, it got bid beyond what I was willing to pay early, and I did not get a photo of it. You’ll have to trust me when I say this tie was about as subtle as a sledgehammer.
Final totally unrelated side note: of course there’s an Internet Movie Firearms Database entry for “Johnny Dangerously”. Just in case you were wondering what the “.88 Magnum” actually was.
Obit watch: October 2, 2021.
October 2nd, 2021For the historical record: NYT obits for Tommy Kirk and Commander Cody. The obit for the latter includes a video of “Hot Rod Lincoln”, which I was intending to go back and embed anyway.
Carlisle Floyd, opera guy.
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Obit watch: September 30, 2021.
September 30th, 2021Still on the road, but arrived safely at my destination yesterday. Blogging is still as time permits, but a few obits:
Tommy Kirk, of “Old Yeller”.
George Frayne, also know as “Commander Cody” of “Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen”.
(Hattip on those to Lawrence.)
NYT obit for Clive Sinclair.
Updates later.
Travel day.
September 29th, 2021Going to be driving pretty much all day. Blogging will be catch as catch can today and for the next few days.
Art (Acevedo), damn it! watch. (#AG of a series)
September 28th, 2021I was not expecting this.
When last we left Art Acevedo, he was the new police chief in Miami.
How’s that working out for him?
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Chief Acevedo has accused several commissioners of thwarting his attempts to “change the culture” of the department, as he said he had been hired to do, by improperly meddling in personnel decisions.
“These events are deeply troubling and sad,” he wrote in an eight-page letter on Friday in which he denounced how commissioners tried to influence an internal affairs investigation and then retaliated by defunding top positions in the Police Department’s budget. “If I or M.P.D. give in to the improper actions described herein,” he added, “as a Cuban immigrant, I and my family might as well have remained in Communist Cuba, because Miami and M.P.D. would be no better than the repressive regime and the police state we left behind.”
The commissioners can’t directly fire him, only the city manager can. But they can make things uncomfortable.
…he wasted no time in generating controversy of his own. He terminated two high-ranking officers and demoted the department’s second-highest-ranking female Black officer. He said his own department — rather than the Florida Department of Law Enforcement — should investigate police shootings. And he angered the police union by telling a local radio station that officers should get vaccinated against the coronavirus or risk losing their jobs.
Last week, a majority of members polled by the Fraternal Order of Police said that they had no confidence in the chief and that he should be fired or forced to resign.
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At one point, Commissioner Joe Carollo frame-grabbed a video clip of Chief Acevedo, taken before he worked in Miami, performing a raunchy dance at a fund-raiser. (In another clip, he was dressed like Elvis, prompting Mr. Carollo to tut-tut the tightness of the chief’s pants.)
A supporter of the chief at one point yelled at the dais and, as he stomped out of the chambers, extended a finger to the commissioners.
Mr. Carollo spent several hours reading news clippings and other documents about Chief Acevedo’s record in law enforcement agencies in California and Texas, including at least one allegation of sexual harassment that the chief has denied. Mr. Carollo repeatedly asked Mr. Noriega if he had been aware of those controversies before hiring Chief Acevedo.
“No, sir,” Mr. Noriega responded.
“He’s not accountable to anyone,” Mr. Carollo said of Chief Acevedo. “He’s not accountable to the city manager, not accountable to the residents of Miami — not accountable, period.”
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Chief Acevedo is the sixth police chief in 11 years.
Obit watch: September 27, 2021.
September 27th, 2021Frances T. “Sissy” Farenthold, noted female Texas politician of the 1960s and 1970s.
I wouldn’t have picked up on this if it wasn’t for the NYT obit: the HouChron ran one, but it was kind of buried, and they just re-ran the WP obit. The Statesman ran one…from the Corpus Christi newspaper.
Yeah, she was a progressive, and I probably would have disagreed with her about everything. But she was a significant figure in Texas politics. Also, her story is full of sad.
Owing to the efforts of a slightly older brother, Benjamin Dudley III, to pronounce the word “sister,” the infant Mary Frances would be known to the end of her life as Sissy.
When Sissy was 2, and Benjamin 3, he died from complications of surgery to remove a swallowed coin. Her parents’ grief suffused the household ever after, she said.
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Three days after Ms. Farenthold’s runoff defeat, the body of her 32-year-old stepson, Randy Farenthold, from her husband’s prior marriage, was found in the Gulf of Mexico near Corpus Christi. His hands were bound and a concrete block was chained round his neck.
The younger Mr. Farenthold, described in the press as a millionaire playboy, had been scheduled to testify in the federal trial of four associates alleged to have defrauded him of $100,000 in a money-laundering scheme reported to involve organized crime. (One of them, Bruce Bass III, was indicted in the murder in 1976 and received a 16-year sentence in a plea agreement the next year.)
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In 1989, her youngest child, Jimmy, disappeared, at 33. Jimmy, who was Vincent’s identical twin, was said never to have gotten over his brother’s death; by the time he was a young man he was addicted to drugs and drifting around Texas. Despite extensive searches, he was never found and is presumed dead. (The family held a funeral for him in 2005.)
Ms. Farenthold’s marriage ended in divorce. She is survived by her son George Farenthold II, who said the cause of death was Parkinson’s disease; another son, Dudley; a daughter, Emilie C. Farenthold; a sister, Genevieve Hearon; three grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and a step-grandson, Blake, the son of Randy Farenthold. A younger brother, Dudley Tarlton, was killed in a helicopter crash in 2003.
Jean Hale, actress. She was in “In Like Flint” and “The Oscar”, appeared on “Batman” twice, and did guest shots on the good “5-0”, “Cannon”, “Perry Mason”, and “The Wild Wild West”, among other credits.
Bobby Zarem, noted PR guy.
Mr. Zarem’s clients included (in alphabetical order) Alan Alda, Ann-Margret, Woody Allen, Michael Caine, Cher, Michael Douglas, Dustin Hoffman, Sophia Loren, Jack Nicholson, Diana Ross, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.
He publicized the films “Tommy” (by staging a gala party in a Midtown Manhattan subway station) and “Saturday Night Fever” (after stealing stills of the production from the studio, which expected the movie to flop and neglected to distribute photographs of John Travolta), as well as “Rambo,” “Dances With Wolves” and “Pumping Iron,” the 1977 documentary about bodybuilding, which starred Mr. Schwarzenegger. For that film, Mr. Zarem arranged a meeting with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that helped elevate Mr. Schwarzenegger to global superstardom.
Your loser update: week 3, 2021.
September 27th, 2021NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Detroit
New York Football Giants
New York Jets
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Still a little early, and I apologize to Infidel de Manahatta, but I’m starting to think there’s a good chance of at least one New York team going winless this year.
Maybe both: it doesn’t look like the Jets and the Giants play against each other this year.
And speaking of my odd sense of humor…
September 25th, 2021My wife once asked me to help my daughter with the perspective on a diorama she was making for school.
I said, "Maddy, in 20 years nobody will give a shit about your diorama" https://t.co/cMpmFrmgmy
— Robert Kroese (@robkroese) September 23, 2021
Obit watch: September 25, 2021.
September 25th, 2021Cliff Freeman, advertising guy.
Among his credits: “Where’s the beef?”
In 1984, Wendy’s was looking to differentiate its burger, the modestly named Single, from McDonald’s Big Mac and Burger King’s Whopper. Research found that the Wendy’s Single patty was larger than the patties of the Big Mac and Whopper.
Working with the director Joe Sedelmaier, Mr. Freeman created separate commercials, one with three old women and one with three old men, scrutinizing the fluffy hamburger bun before seeing the tiny patty inside. The breakout version was the one with the women, specifically the squawky octogenarian Clara Peller, who demands to know where the beef is.
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Mr. Freeman was still at Dancer Fitzgerald a year later when he wrote another popular Wendy’s commercial, which promoted the chain’s breadth of food choices by parodying the lack of choices in Soviet society. In a faux Russian fashion show, a heavyset woman struts on a runway, modeling the same shapeless dress for day wear, evening wear (accessorized with a flashlight) and swimwear (with a beach ball).
Mr. Freeman said it was his favorite ad, in part because of the response.
“The entire Russian government protested it,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2003. “How much more reaction can you get than that?”
I know it is advertising, and I know my sense of humor is sometimes lowbrow, but I think that’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on television. (I’m also a sucker for jokes about Communism.)
He also did commercials for Little Caesars, Outpost.com, and Fox Sports.
Obit watch: September 24, 2021.
September 24th, 2021He was also in “Hail, Caesar!” and had parts on a few cop shows, including “Columbo” among other credits.
I’m cold, and there are wolves after me.
September 23rd, 2021Obit watch: September 23, 2021.
September 23rd, 2021…
In addition to making movies, Mr. Van Peebles published novels, in French as well as in English; wrote two Broadway musicals and produced them simultaneously; and wrote and performed spoken-word albums that many have called forebears of rap.
Over the course of his life he was also a cable-car driver in San Francisco, a portrait painter in Mexico City, a street performer in Paris, a stock options trader in New York, the navigator of an Air Force bomber, a postal worker, a visual artist and, by his own account, a very successful gigolo.
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…Columbia Pictures then hired him to direct “Watermelon Man” (1970), a satirical comedy about a white bigot, played by Godfrey Cambridge, who turns into a Black man.
Columbia wanted Mr. Van Peebles to shoot alternative endings — one in which the protagonist becomes a Black militant, and another in which he discovers that it was all a dream. Mr. Van Peebles said he “forgot” to shoot the second ending.
Disliking working for a studio, he set out to be an independent filmmaker. To make “Sweetback,” for $500,000, he combined his $70,000 savings with loans, used a nonunion crew and persuaded a film lab to extend him credit.
The plot of the movie concerns a man who attacks two crooked police officers and then escapes as a fugitive to Mexico, vowing to return and “collect some dues.” Only two theaters, in Detroit and Atlanta, would show the movie at first, but it caught fire and for several weeks outgrossed “Love Story.” Its American box office exceeded $15 million (about $100 million in today’s money), a bonanza for an independent film at the time.
Barbara Campbell Cooke. She actually passed away in April at 85, but her family didn’t make an announcement until recently.
She married Sam Cooke in 1959 (or 1958, according to Wikipedia). When he died in 1964, she married Bobby Womack (who worked with Sam Cooke) three months later. He was 19, she was 29, and a lot of fans were not happy.
The sad goes on. The Cookes had a son who died at 18 months. Ms. Cooke and Mr. Womack also had a son who strugged with addiction and killed himself at 21.
Bobby Womack experienced fame early on when the Rolling Stones covered his 1964 song “It’s All Over Now,” their first No. 1 hit. He died in 2014 at 70, but not before suffering other tragedies. Another son of his, Truth, died when he was a baby, and Mr. Womack’s brother Harry was murdered by a girlfriend.
“I don’t speak to Barbara no more,” Mr. Womack wrote in his memoir. “Linda doesn’t speak to her. Haven’t spoken to Cecil for years. No one speaks to no one.”
Al Harrington. He was “Ben Kokua” in the good 5-0 (his character replaced Kono), and was a surf shop owner in the bad 5-0. Also a couple of appearances on “Jake and the Fatman”, among other credits.
Roger Michell, director. Most of his films were British, but he’s perhaps best known for “Notting Hill” (that Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant movie) and “Changing Lanes” (the Ben Affleck/Samuel L. Jackson movie).
Obit watch: September 22, 2021.
September 22nd, 2021Loral I Delaney, well known dog trainer…and legendary trapshooter.
An animal lover who as a young girl kept as pets every creature from raccoons to skunks, Delaney at age 5 headlined her first dog act in 1943 at the Northwest Sportshow in Minneapolis.
When she returned to the same stage a year later, the Minneapolis Tribune gushed, “The tiny daughter of Fred Armstrong put her two beautiful black Labradors through a retrieving act that literally brought down the house.”
In the nearly six decades that followed, Delaney and her dogs would appear at sports shows from New York to Los Angeles. She often drove herself, pulling a trailer full of Labradors, setters, pointers and Chesapeake Bay retrievers.
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Trapshooting brought Delaney still wider acclaim. The first time she competed at the Minnesota State Trapshoot at age 19, she won the women’s title, breaking 197×200. At the same competition, she won the handicap in a shoot-off with five men.
A member of the National Trapshooting Hall of Fame, Delaney was named to every All-American Trapshooting team from 1966 to 1981, with the exception of one year. She won the Women’s World Flyer Championships four times. She shot on the U.S. Women’s Trapshooting Team before women’s trapshooting was included in the Olympics. And she and Chuck won the husband-wife U.S. trapshooting title four times.
Delaney also won seven Grand American World Trapshooting Championships, include five years consecutively, and was the only woman to win more than two in a row and more than four total.
Bennie Pete, leader of the New Orleans brass band, the Hot 8.
The Hot 8 began playing for tips on Bourbon Street and in Jackson Square, in the heart of the French Quarter. They performed outside a housing project in the Central City neighborhood, where people sat down with bags of crawfish and bottles of Abita beer to listen. Mr. Pete once found himself leading a jazz funeral for a dog.
“He was a popular dog for one of the popular musicians,” he told Esquire magazine in 2014, “and they threw a big second-line parade through the streets for him. They’d make a reason to party.”
By 2000, the Hot 8 had established itself as part of a vanguard of young brass bands that were upholding the jazz and funk traditions of New Orleans yet playing with a contemporary sound. The Hot 8’s repertoire included songs by the Specials and Marvin Gaye, and the band incorporated rap and hip-hop into its style. The musicians led second lines on Sundays for social aid and pleasure clubs; crowds formed at night to watch them play in bars in the Treme neighborhood.
Post Katrina, the Hot 8 led the effort to keep New Orleans’s musical heritage intact.
Two months later, the Hot 8 regrouped to lead the first jazz funeral in New Orleans after the storm. The band played with donated instruments, and members of the procession wore salvaged pieces of finery. The parade, which honored a celebrated chef, Austin Leslie, started at Pampy’s Creole Kitchen in the Seventh Ward before ambling to the former site of Chez Helene, where a sign greeted the marchers: “We won’t bow down. Save our soul.”
As despair weighed on the city, the Hot 8 began performing at evacuation shelters and emergency medical centers. They drove around in a van, stopping to jam for crowds until little second lines formed, before heading to another part of town. It wasn’t long before they became local heroes.
“Bennie wanted to play for these people to give them that New Orleans love that was missing,” his wife said. “He and the band got busy spreading the culture around.”
They were featured in Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke” and got a record deal.
Released in 2012, “The Life & Times Of …” was nominated for a Grammy Award as best regional roots music album. The group released “Tombstone,” a sister album also based on the theme of remembrance, the next year. The Hot 8 was also featured on a 2015 compilation album, “New Orleans Brass Bands: Through the Streets of the City,” on the Smithsonian’s Folkways label.
“Everything kind of worked,” Mr. Pete told Esquire. “Yeah, we are the Hot 8 who went through these things, but we’re still here, and this is who we are after the storm.”
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But even as music returned to New Orleans after the storm, the Hot 8 endured more misfortune. Their snare drummer, Dinerral Shavers, was shot dead in his car in December 2006. It was only the latest in a series of tragedies for the band.
In 1996, the trumpet player Jacob Johnson was shot in the head at his home. In 2004, the trombonist Joseph Williams was killed in an encounter with the police. And just after Katrina, the trumpeter Terrell Batiste lost his legs in a road accident.
Mr. Pete was 45 years old. He died from complications of COVID and sarcoidosis, according to his family.
Willie Garson, from “Sex and the City”.
In addition to the “Sex and the City” movies, Mr. Garson worked with the Farrelly brothers in some of their films, including “Kingpin” (1996), “There’s Something About Mary” (1998) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).
He also played Lee Harvey Oswald three times, in the film “Ruby” (1992) and on the TV shows “Quantum Leap” and “MADtv.”
Saadi Yacef. He was a major figure in the Algerian revolt.
Mr. Yacef became involved in opposition movements while still a teenager and in 1954 joined the Front de Libération Nationale, the F.L.N., the leading nationalist organization during the war for independence. The war lasted from 1954 to 1962, ending with the country’s liberation from France.
He became the organization’s military chief in Algiers in 1956, ordering bombings and other guerrilla attacks until his arrest by French paratroopers the next year in the part of the city known as the casbah. He was sentenced to death.
“While I was in prison the executions were always done at dawn,” he told The Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, in 2007, “so when I saw the sun coming through the prison bars I knew I was going to live through another day. But I was very certain that I would be executed.”
Charles de Gaulle eventually freed him. And then he went on to act in Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers”.
With a script based on his book, he met with Mr. Pontecorvo, who was said to have been considering his own movie about the Algerian War, one that he hoped would star Paul Newman as a French paratrooper turned journalist. Mr. Yacef and his backers nixed that idea, and Mr. Pontecorvo found Mr. Yacef’s script propagandistic, but they continued to talk. Mr. Yacef arranged to bring Mr. Pontecorvo and his screenwriter, Franco Solinas, to Algiers for an extended stay so they could study up on the revolution, see locations where the fighting had occurred and meet people who had fought.
The resulting movie, filmed in Algeria with Mr. Yacef as a producer, had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 1966 and caused a sensation for its startling realism. Some scenes, especially of bombings, looked so authentic that the film in its initial showings was preceded by a disclaimer saying that no newsreel footage had been used.
I have “The Battle of Algiers” but haven’t watched it yet. It is a tough sell for the Saturday Night Movie Group, especially since I sort of forced them to watch another movie about the Algerian revolt (“Lost Command“, based on The Centurions by Jean Lartéguy).