Happy Independence Day, everyone. Today marks 249 years of not giving a flying flip at a rolling doughnut what the British royal family thinks.
It is going to be a busy three-day weekend, but I did want to quickly note the death of Michael Madsen. NYT (archived).
Kenneth Colley. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “The Bill”, and “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (credited as “Jesus”).
Robert Holton, big damn hero. He was 81.
Taxol is a hugely important drug in cancer treatment. It was originally isolated from the yew tree, but there just aren’t enough yew trees to go around. In order to isolate the drug, the trees had to be stripped of their bark, which killed them.
Dr. Holton was the first person to figure out how to synthesize Taxol in a lab, without killing yew trees.
“I have always been drawn to difficult problems, and synthesizing Taxol was a big one,” Dr. Holton said in 2018 during remarks at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Inventors in Washington, D.C. He was elected an academy fellow that year. “Seeing the drug’s success in treating so many patients has been an incredibly gratifying experience.”
The National Cancer Institute estimates that more than one million patients have been treated with Taxol. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1992 for ovarian cancer and, in 1994, for advanced breast cancer. The chemo agent is also used for the treatment of lung cancer and Kaposi’s sarcoma, among other malignancies, Dr. Boyd said.
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Barry Longyear, SF writer. I don’t have a formal obit I can link, but Michael Swanwick put up a tribute/obit on his blog.
I won’t say that I didn’t care about Diddy. I did care, to the extent that it was a mildly interesting true crime story, and this is hookersnblow.com. Beyond that, meh.
But: the Wikipedia entry on the Mann Act is interesting, especially the section on “Notable prosecutions under the Mann Act“.
I’m sure everyone remembers Jack Johnson (though I didn’t remember Donald Trump pardoned him in 2018). Others: Frank Lloyd Wright (charges dropped), Charlie Chaplin (acquitted), Charles Manson (charges dropped), and Chuck Berry (convicted, sentenced to three years, served one and half).
Jim Shooter, Marvel comics guy.
Shooter professionalized what had been a loose company in an even looser industry, making sure books were published on time, artists were paid on time and even given royalties and health insurance.
He also had a flair for developing talent, and under his aegis Marvel put out now-classic stories from writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne on Uncanny X-Men, Frank Miller on Daredevil and Walt Simonson on Thor, among others. While the artists became among the biggest names in the industry, X-Men became not only the most dominant and influential comic of the decade and beyond, but one of the first true franchises of the industry.
With 1984’s Secret Wars, a 12-issue miniseries that Shooter, Mike Zeck and John Beatty drew, he instituted the concept of publishing crossover events, a companywide initiative that saw one main story play out and influence many of the other titles coming out for months on end. Secret Wars was a massive publishing success and a toy bonanza. It’s a concept that is still being used by Marvel and DC to this day, in varying degrees.
He took fans seriously, and just like Weisinger, called and wrote readers out of the blue. Carter Beats the Devil author Glen David Gold wrote in his 2018 memoir, I Will Be Complete, of how in the summer before he entered high school in the late 1970s, Shooter phoned after reading a SHIELD story he had sent in. Perhaps seeing something of himself in a teen writing superhero stories, Shooter was encouraging, telling the auspicious writer to read as much as he could in high school and to study science.
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Still, while many call Shooter a “complicated man,” Larry Hama, who was writing G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero for Marvel as well as editing titles, said that he believed Shooter was always trying to do the right thing. Hama recalled on Facebook how Shooter put a writer-artist on the company’s insurance plan the day after he died in order to help out his widow. (The talent had qualified for the health and insurance plan and wanted to sign up, but Marvel policy only allowed for sign-ups on Wednesdays. The man had died on the Tuesday.)
Hama wrote, “Without hesitation, Jim took the paperwork from me and went upstairs to push it through. He said, ‘They owe it to him, we just won’t mention that he already passed.’ I witnessed him doing stuff like that several times. None of it was made public for obvious reasons. It could have cost him his job, but he did the right thing.”
The last of the cousins has died.
As Jimmy Lee grew older and more certain that he was on the path of the righteous, he prayed for the salvation of his first cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, the early wild man of rock ’n’ roll who married several times (one bride was his 13-year-old cousin) and who thumbed his nose at conventional morality, as the writer Nick Tosches recounted in “Hellfire,” his biography of Mr. Lewis.
The country singer Mickey Gilley was also a first cousin to both Mr. Swaggart and Mr. Lewis. About the same age, the three boys were childhood companions. They learned to play an uncle’s piano and occasionally disobeyed their parents by going to a Black nightclub, where they were entranced by the music and dancing, Mr. Tosches wrote.
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Holidays, that is. This is one of those times of the year when we have a whole string of them in a short time.
Happy Bobby Bonilla Day, everyone!
I almost forgot (because it is Saturday) to wish everyone a happy Gavrilo Princip Day!
Please remember to make a toast to the late guffaw.
Perhaps by next year I’ll have found a nice FN 1910.
Fred Espenak, astrophysicist. He was known as “Mr. Eclipse”.
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In the early 1990s, Mr. Espenak began writing NASA’s eclipse bulletins with the Canadian meteorologist Jay Anderson. He also started a website for the space agency devoted to eclipse data. His goal: simplify and democratize complicated data so nonscientists sky gazers could geek out on the data, too.
All the while, he kept chasing eclipses — traveling to Kenya, Indonesia, Mexico, Aruba, Turkey, Zambia, Antarctica, Spain, Libya and beyond.
Lalo Schifrin. He was 93, and dang, what a career.
(Edited to add 6/28: NYT obit, which just went up today.)
The workaholic Schifrin received Oscar nominations for his scores for Cool Hand Luke (1967), The Fox (1968), Voyage of the Damned (1976), The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Sting II (1983) and for the song “People Alone” from The Competition (1980).
He scored Dirty Harry (1971) and the sequels Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988), all starring Clint Eastwood — the filmmaker presented him with his Oscar — and served as the composer on all three of the Rush Hour films.
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His résumé also included work on Coogan’s Bluff (1968) — that kicked off his long association with Eastwood and director Don Siegel — Kelly’s Heroes (1970), Charley Varrick (1973), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Telefon (1977), The Nude Bomb (1980), Black Moon Rising (1986), Money Talks (1997), Something to Believe In (1998), Tango (1998), Bringing Down the House (2003) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004).
An inspired Bruce Lee worked out to the show’s score in his gym in Hong Kong before signing Schifrin as the composer and orchestrator on Enter the Dragon (1973). As a bonus, Lee gave the musician his first martial arts lessons, for free.
Schifrin concocted a jazz waltz in 3/4 time for the theme to the Mike Connors series Mannix — also produced by Geller — and played the Moog synthesizer on the opening music for another 1960s’ CBS drama, Medical Center.
Schifrin also was responsible for the themes for T.H.E. Cat, Petrocelli, Starsky & Hutch, Bronk and Most Wanted. And his “Tar Sequence” music from Cool Hand Luke was adopted by ABC affiliates for their Eyewitness News broadcasts.
IMDB.
Rick Hurst, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Return of the Killer Shrews”, “Supertrain”, and “Murder, She Wrote”.
Carolyn McCarthy, former Congresswoman from Long Island and prominent gun control advocate.
I bet you thought I wasn’t going to post this, didn’t you? Yes, I’ve used it before (though not in this version) but for my money, I think this is the greatest TV theme of all time. (Though I admit it does have some stiff competition.)
We are exactly at the halfway point of the baseball season, though the All-Star Game doesn’t take place until July 15th.
Seems like a good time to do a loser update.
I think we’ve narrowed it down to two teams of significant interest.
The Chicago White Sox are at 26-55, for a .321 winning percentage. By my projections, that works out to 110 losses. Better than last year, and not record setting, but still pretty awful.
The Colorado Rockies are at 18-63, for a .222 winning percentage. As a caliber, .222 isn’t bad, but .224 is better. As a record, that works out to a projected 126 losses, which would be record setting. .222 would also be the lowest winning percentage in the modern (1901 and later) era, beating out the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics.
A while back, I quoted a report from the “Recoil” website that BATFE had banned imports of non-lethal training ammunition, such as Simunition.
“Recoil” is now reporting that BATFE has reversed that ban, on ATF Ruling 2025-2, “effective immediately”.
As they point out, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the manufacturers will resume selling to non law enforcement and military customers, but at least the legal impediments are out of the way.
(Hattip: Greg Ellifritz’s “Weekend Knowledge Dump”.)
It got really busy up in here in terms of obits, especially late in the day.
I’m going to wait until tomorrow, as is this blog’s policy, to let things shake out. The paper of record has probably had Bill Moyers in the can for years, but I’m sure there’s going to be some sort of update or correction.
Bobby Sherman. NYT (archived). Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, and “Flying High”.
NYT obit for Blake Farenthold.
Aki Aleong, actor. He was “Colonel Quoc” in an episode of “Airwolf” and “General Quoc” in “Braddock: Missing in Action III”, so he must have gotten promoted a few times in four years. Other credits include “Mancuso, FBI”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “The Wackiest Ship in the Army”, and three episodes of “Babylon 5”.