I’m still here.

August 14th, 2025

There just hasn’t been much I’ve felt like blogging about. No obits that I’ve thought were sufficiently notable.

I still can’t upload images to the blog, so no gun book blogging and no random gun crankery. Bluehost support has been as useless as teats on a boar hog, and I’m planning to migrate the blog over to Siteground. The problem is, I want to be fully here when the migration gets done, and I’ve been wrapped up in so many things outside the blog that I haven’t been able to coordinate the migration yet. I expect to do that towards the end of the month.

(I will be leaving town for a few days the later part of next week.)

One thing I will mention in passing: I have rejoined the Richard the III Society. I’ve been an off-and-on member, but I had let my membership lapse. However, this came up when the Saturday Movie Group was watching “Richard III“: Lawrence was somewhat astounded when I told him I had been a member, so I decided I’d sign up again.

(I recommend “Richard III” for two reasons. One, Ian McKellen is great in it. Two, the whole movie is just absolutely bat guano insane, and I loved every minute of it.)

(And, as everyone knows, I am a sucker for lost causes and beautiful women. One of those explains my membership in the Richard the III Society.)

A very brief gun related note: Leupold no longer makes any pistol scopes, and says they don’t have any plans to introduce new ones in the future. As best as Mike the Musicologist and I can tell, Burris is your only option for a pistol scope at the moment.

Posted in Admin, Guns, History, Movies | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 9, 2025.

August 9th, 2025

Captain James A. Lovell Jr. (USN – ret.) NASA page.

Captain Lovell, a former Navy test pilot, flew for some 715 hours in space, the most of any astronaut in the pioneering Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs forged by the United States as it vied with the Soviet Union to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.
He took part in two Gemini missions that orbited Earth and was one of the three astronauts aboard Apollo 8, the first spaceflight to orbit the moon, before he was chosen by NASA for Apollo 13.

I’m sure all my readers know what happened with Apollo 13. If you don’t, there’s a really good movie about Apollo 13, and a lot of details in the obit.

It isn’t everyone who gets Tom Hanks to play them in a movie. (And Jim Lovell played the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, which gives him a Bacon number of 1.)

Captain Lovell’s first space mission came in December 1965 when he orbited Earth with Lt. Col. Frank Borman in Gemini 7, a flight of more than 330 hours that included the first rendezvous of two manned spacecraft, the type of maneuver that would have to be carried out for a moon landing.
Captain Lovell commanded Gemini 12 in November 1966, flying with Maj. Buzz Aldrin of the Air Force, who in July 1969 became the second man to walk on the moon, after Neil Armstrong, in the flight of Apollo 11.
Gemini 12 carried out 59 orbits of Earth over four days to close out the Gemini program.
Captain Lovell was the command module pilot on the six-day journey of Apollo 8 at Christmastime 1968, joining with Colonel Borman and Maj. William A. Anders as the first men to orbit the moon, looping around it 10 times.

William H. Webster, former head of both the CIA and the FBI.

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Drink!

August 6th, 2025

Shot:

A merchant’s sheltered but cheerful daughter, fighting to control a fire spirit that lives inside her, and a grieving half-orc warrior, who, like many an orc of his kind, has green skin and tusks, fall madly in love while he escorts her to marry a prince in a far-off kingdom. During their journey, the human and the half-orc have a lot of raunchy sex.
It sounds like a fever dream, but it’s actually the plot of “Tusk Love,” a romance novel that landed on the New York Times best-seller list last month. How the book got there is as twisty as the novel’s central love affair — and the latest, and perhaps most unusual, example of how internet-driven fandom can intersect with publishing to create hit books.

Chaser:

Spicy bar snack: I, Libertine Kindle edition on Amazon. Wikipedia.

Posted in Bagatelle, Books, Kindleing | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: August 4, 2025.

August 4th, 2025

Loni Anderson. NYT.

“WKRP” was a great show, and she was a big part of what made it great. (“And, as we know, Jennifer was the smartest person in the room.” Yes, Jennifer was smart, and I’d even agree deceptively smart. But “smartest person in the room”? Hello, Bailey Quarters. Hello, Venus Flytrap. That’s another one of the things that made “WKRP” great: multiple smart people.)

Edited to add: I probably should have put in an IMDB link. Especially since Lawrence asked:

Who is killing the cast of “3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain”?

Rahaman Ali. Long time readers know I don’t like covering people just because of their relationship with other famous people. But Mr. Ali has an interesting story.

He was Muhammad Ali’s brother.

Rahaman Ali was a promising amateur boxer who won his first professional fight in an undercard bout the same evening that his brother beat Liston to become the world heavyweight champion. Rahaman went on to earn a middling record of 10 wins, three losses and one draw. He retired after a technical knockout in 1972.
Several figures from the brothers’ youth later said in interviews that Rahaman Ali had been a clever, coachable fighter who just lacked Muhammad’s charisma. When a group of Louisville businessmen got together to sponsor Muhammad, then known as Cassius Clay, they left Rahaman, then Rudy Clay, out of the deal. (The two brothers changed their names and joined the Nation of Islam around the same time in the early 1960s.)

He gave up his career to become part of Muhammad’s entourage, serving as “chauffeur, sparring partner, gofer, chef and cornerman”. Also human wristwatch, because Muhammad wouldn’t wear one: he’d just ask Rahaman for the time.

In 1990, speaking to The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Rahaman Ali expressed regret for not having focused on his own boxing career.
After his own bouts, “Muhammad never said, ‘Good fight, good fight, Rahaman,’” Rahaman said. “I feel he could have come back and congratulated me.”

…

Mr. Eig wrote that though Muhammad Ali had once promised always to provide for his brother, Rahaman had begun to live in poverty after a falling-out with Lonnie, Muhammad’s fourth and final wife.
He was sometimes described showing up to Ali Center events attended by his brother yet hardly speaking to him, instead wandering around to introduce himself as “Muhammad Ali’s brother.” Mr. Eig described one such occasion in 2015. Rahaman was not among the list of eminences who got a private audience with Muhammad. Afterward, he walked from table to table, collecting small decorative photographs of Muhammad and putting them into a shopping bag.

Flaco Jiménez, Tex-Mex accordion player. This isn’t my style of music, but even I’d heard of Flaco Jiménez. He was just that big a deal.

David Rendall, operatic tenor. I find this noteworthy because he had a series of…issues? Accidents?

In April 2005, Mr. Rendall was singing Radamès in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen when part of the stage collapsed, destroying the set. He was “knocked down at least 15 feet and tried to crawl to safety to avoid being crushed,” he later told The Telegraph of London. “I thought I was going to die,” a fate that awaits Radamès in the opera but is not normally faced by tenors singing the role.
Mr. Rendall had knee and hip replacements and surgery to his shoulder after the accident. Directors stopped calling, and he had to put his home up for sale. “I can’t do what some directors want onstage,” he told the British newspaper The Telegraph. He received some compensation from the theater but sued anyway.

Before that he nearly killed his singing partner.

Mr. Rendall was singing Canio in “I Pagliacci” in Milwaukee in November 1998 — his ringing performance of the great Act I aria “Vesti la giubba” is particularly noteworthy — when he nearly stabbed to death the baritone Kimm Julian.
The last scene includes, in the libretto, just such a stabbing, when Canio kills Silvio, the lover of his unfaithful wife.
“I’d been given my props when we started rehearsing, and these included a knife for the stabbing scene,” Mr. Rendall later told The New York Times. “At the crucial moment, just as I’d done 12 times before, I pushed the button to make the blade retract. But when I looked down, I saw to my amazement that the blade was still out.”
Mr. Julian, blood-soaked, collapsed. The blade had gone three inches into his chest and narrowly missed killing him.

The remaining performances of the show sold out. Mr. Julian made a full recovery. Mr. Rendall was questioned by the police, but ultimately released.

Posted in 1970s, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 1, 2025.

August 1st, 2025

Cécile Dionne, of the Dionne quintuplets.

I suspect most of my readers are passingly familiar with this story, but if you’re not, I recommend reading the obit. In brief, the quintuplets were made wards of the state after their birth and placed on public display by the doctor who delivered some of them.

[Dr. Allan Ray Dafoe] teamed up with province officials to create a gilded prison for the infants, a vast compound known as Quintland. An observation balcony was built so that the girls could be viewed by tourists, who numbered as many as 6,000 a day, many of them buying bumper stickers that read, “We have seen the Dionne quintuplets.” Behind a seven-foot-tall barbed-wire fence and protected from both germs and kidnappers, the babies were isolated from all companions or relatives except one another.

They were left with emotional scars from the experience, and possibly from parental abuse after their parents regained custody. Emilie Dionne died in a convent at the age of 20. Marie Dionne died at 36.

In 1995, when they were past 60, the three surviving quintuplets said in a ghostwritten book that their father had sexually abused them as teenagers — an accusation that their other siblings denied and that some critics suggested had been motivated by a hope that the book would be a big success. It wasn’t.
But the sisters had sued the province of Ontario for compensation, and after a public uproar, they received a $2.8 million settlement, which seemed to secure their financial future.
For Cécile, who had worked as a clerk in a supermarket, the solvency was short-lived. Her surviving twin son, Bertrand, helped her buy a duplex apartment, where they lived together for a few years. Then, with Cécile’s health beginning to fail, Bertrand sold the home and moved his mother to a high-end senior residence. But he stopped paying the monthly fees in 2010 and disappeared without a trace.
Impoverished, hobbled after a hip replacement and with failing eyesight because of macular degeneration, Cécile was forced into a shabby old-age home, again a ward of the state. Annette helped her by buying a refrigerator for her room and paying for haircuts. The sisters talked several times a day and, as always, completed each other’s sentences.

Yvonne Dionne died in 2001. With Cécile Dionne’s death, Annette is the last surviving quintuplet.

Posted in History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 31, 2025.

July 31st, 2025

Robert Wilson, “theater director, playwright and visual artist”, and a good Texas boy.

Time was an important element for Mr. Wilson, too. Where playwrights traditionally compressed time in their works, Mr. Wilson expanded it. His stage work “KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE,” which had its premiere in 1972 at the Festival of Arts in Shiraz, Iran, ran 168 hours and was presented over 10 days. Viewers were astonished and outraged to see actors taking hours to complete actions as simple as walking across the stage or slicing an onion.

…

By contrast, Mr. Wilson’s first foray into opera, and his first collaboration with Mr. Glass, “Einstein on the Beach” (1976), is a comparatively trim five-hour work. It has no plot, but its tableaux touches on nuclear power, space travel and even Einstein’s love of playing the violin. And while it has plenty of text — counting sequences, solfège syllables, the lyrics to the pop song “Mr. Bojangles” and sections of poetry and prose by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs — none of it is dialogue. The audience, free to leave and return during a performance, is presented with ideas about Einstein by inference and metaphor rather than directly.

…

“Einstein,” which had its premiere at the Festival d’Avignon in France in July 1976 and was staged at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York that November, has proved to be among the most durable works in Mr. Wilson’s and Mr. Glass’s catalogs. It has been recorded three times and revived regularly, with world tours in 1985, 1992 and 2012-15.

…

Mr. Wilson and Mr. Glass teamed up again, in 1984, to produce “The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down,” the fifth act, called “the Rome Section,” of what was to be a 12-hour opera, with other sections composed by Jo Kondo, David Byrne, Gavin Bryars and others. Because of funding problems, the full work was never produced. But Mr. Wilson and Mr. Glass went on to produce two more operas, “White Raven” and “Monsters of Grace” (both 1998). In 2022, Mr. Wilson produced “H-100 Seconds to Midnight,” a work inspired by the physicist Stephen Hawking, with texts by Etel Adnan and music by Mr. Glass and Dickie Landry.

…

Mr. Wilson’s other notable collaborations include Euripides’s “Alcestis” (1986) with Laurie Anderson; “Cosmopolitan Greetings” (1988) with Allen Ginsberg; a Spirituals recital, “Great Day in the Morning” (1982), and stagings of Schoenberg’s “Erwartung” (1995) and Schubert’s “Winterreise” (2001) for the soprano Jessye Norman; “The Old Woman” (2013) with the choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov and the actor Willem Dafoe; and “Bach 6 Solo,” a staging of Bach’s unaccompanied violin works, played by Jennifer Koh and choreographed by Ms. Childs.
He also worked several times with Lady Gaga, including one work at the Louvre in Paris in 2013 involving what he called “Video Portraits” of her.

Laura Dahlmeier.

Ms. Dahlmeier won the sprint and pursuit events in biathlon at the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and added a bronze in the individual event. In Germany, she had helped boost the popularity of the biathlon, a cross-country ski race in which participants also shoot at targets. She won five gold medals at the 2017 world championships in Hochfilzen, Austria, among a total of seven in her career.

She was 31, and died in a climbing accident in Pakistan.

Posted in Music, Sports, Thanks | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 29, 2025.

July 29th, 2025

Might as well start off my 16th year of “looking at obituaries and which coaches got fired“.

Ryne Sandberg. 65 seems a lot younger to me these days than it did in the past. MLB. Baseball Reference.

This amused me: the context is that Mr. Sandberg signed a contract in 1992 that paid him $28.4 million over four years, which was a lot of money at the time.

As Sports Illustrated put it at the time: “Sandberg is a shy, unassuming guy who is a lock for the Hall of Fame. He doesn’t drink, test positive, ram his wife’s car, kick the dog, walk out of camp or say dumb things to the press. The most controversial thing he does is boot a grounder every 25 games or so.”
On signing the extension, Sandberg remarked, “My face will be sore today from the smile.”
But other club owners weren’t grinning. “I’ve said for years that we’re headed for Armageddon,” Al Rosen, the general manager of the San Francisco Giants, told Sports Illustrated. “But now we’re past the gates. To the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Famine, Pestilence, Death and War — we have added a fifth: Unmitigated Greed. It’s going to do us all in. I can’t see baseball surviving this.”

Posted in Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

My blog is broken. Day 8.

July 28th, 2025

I was busy over the weekend and didn’t have a chance to follow-up with Bluehost. I was planning to do so tonight…

…but Bluehost emailed me! The direct message I sent this morning to Sachin Puri (“CEO @ Bluehost Group”) asking whose leg I had to hump to get some action on this ticket may have been a factor in that.

Summarizing, Bluehost’s latest theory is that: “a script is being terminated due to execution time limits, specifically during image processing handled by WordPress”. Which is actually a reasonable theory, and explains some things: if the script is being terminated because it takes too long to run, there’s probably a connection to server load, and that would explain why some people see the problem intermittently.

Options to Resolve

Resize images before uploading to reduce processing time. (recommended)

Disable image resizing via a plugin

Consider upgrading to a VPS or Dedicated plan, where you have full control over PHP limits and resource usage.

I’m not really interested in adding an “image resizing” step to my workflow, especially when this worked in the past without that step. I’m also not really interested in paying more money to get back to where I was.

Next Steps & Suggestions

To further isolate the issue, we recommend:

Retry the upload using WordPress to confirm if the problem persists on your end.

Which I would love to be able to do. But as I’ve mentioned to my readers, and as I told the Bluehost support rep, they’ve set the maximum file upload size for this instance to ZERO BYTES.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 28, 2025.

July 28th, 2025

Tom Lehrer was wrong.

We did not all go together when we go. He went first.

THR. NYT.

Shunsaku Tamiya, CEO of Tamiya Company.

For more than four decades, Mr. Tamiya led the company that bore his family’s name, turning it into one of the world’s largest makers of build-it-yourself plastic model kits of racecars and military vehicles. Since producing its first such kit in 1960, of the Japanese World War II battleship Yamato, Tamiya Co. has become a globally known brand that also produces remote-controlled cars.

…

The company, which was renamed Tamiya in 1984, also won customers because of the meticulous accuracy of its kits. Mr. Tamiya visited military museums around the world to research archives and take pictures of tanks, warships and aircraft. At locations where photography wasn’t allowed, he memorized the details, recording them in a notebook afterward.
During the Cold War, he got his first up-close look at Soviet tanks at a museum in Israel, which had captured them from Arab countries during the Six-Day War.
His company also built model kits of racing cars as well as radio-controlled cars. To make a miniature replica of a Porsche 911 that was perfect down to the shape and placement of the engine, he bought one of the expensive German sports cars.
He did this “not to drive it, but to use it as a reference,” Mr. Tamiya wrote in a memoir. “I brought the 911 into my garage and disassembled everything that could be disassembled.”

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Very short random gun crankery.

July 28th, 2025

One of the things Mike the Musicologist and I did over the weekend was to make a stop in Canyon Lake and go to the local grocery store.

Not because we were hungry, but because we wanted to try out the ammunition vending machine.

They had rifle, handgun, and shotgun ammunition. We didn’t look at the shotgun ammo. The rifle ammo was: .300 Blackout, .223, and Aguila .22 LR ammo. The handgun ammo was 9mm, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP.

We tried to buy one box of .45 and two boxes of .22 LR. The prices weren’t great, but we were treating this as an experiment.

Unfortunately, there was some sort of problem when I tried to use Apple Pay for the transaction: I think it couldn’t recognize my face due to the position I was in, and the passcode failed as well. And when Apple Pay failed, it left the machine totally locked up. We couldn’t get it to respond to any of the buttons on the screen, or even reset. Poor error handling on the part of the implementation team, I believe.

Sadly, we had to chalk this up as a failed experiment. But I did get some taco-flavored Doritos while I was there. I haven’t seen those around in a while.

Posted in Food, Guns | 2 Comments »

Birthday musical interlude.

July 28th, 2025

Today, my blog is old enough to drive.

At least with a provisional driver’s license in the state of Texas.

It was a busy weekend. I’ll have some more updates later. But how about a musical interlude?

And speaking of Tennessee Ernie Williams, this sounds like one of the upper circles of Hell to me. But I can’t pass up the opportunity to quote the phrase used in the NYT headline, “Tennessee Williams on ice”.

At the Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Skating Rink, home of the North Berkshire Youth Hockey Black Bears, five talented skaters performed Will Davis’s “The Gig,” a diverting if impenetrable riff on a late Williams novel called “Moise and the World of Reason.” As the skaters swirled and swooshed in pretty patterns and garish costumes, never enacting the story literally but suggesting a circle of queer friends and lovers, the audience listened on headphones to selections from the novel while trying to stay warm.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

My blog is broken. Days 5 and 6.

July 25th, 2025

I contacted Bluehost last night to follow up on my ticket.

They claimed they emailed me a status update, which I never received. (Yes, I checked my junk and spam folders.)

They also claimed that I needed to delete some “malware infected” files. The specific ones they cited were:

/home4/sportsg3/public_html/500.php
/home4/sportsg3/public_html/sdclog/500.php

I looked at those files. They looked like standard HTML files displaying a “500 Internal Server Error”. I saw no evidence that they were infected in any way. But Bluehost support refused to proceed until I deleted those files and a “security scan” came back “clean”.

Now that I’ve done that, I’m waiting for an update from Bluehost support. Which I probably won’t get, as they keep claiming to send updates that I don’t get. (They are sending the updates to the admin address with Bluehost, which is also where the chat transcripts (that I am getting) go to.)

In the meantime, I talked to Siteground. They offer everything Bluehost does, and will even do a professional migration of all of my WordPress instances from Bluehost to their hosting. Even better, the first “professional migration” is free, and ones after that are reasonably priced. And their chat rep was pleasant and seemed knowledgeable. (Of course, I don’t know if they were sales or support.)

This may be the way I end up going.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

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