Oh, Wendell.
He was charged with “simple battery” and released on bond.
(Subject line explained, for non “Wire” fans.)
The Bunk is strictly a Clinton motherf—er.
May 16th, 2016Aux armes, citoyens, Formez vos bataillons, Marchons, marchons!
May 15th, 2016I could claim that I wanted to split this out into a separate obit for reasons. Which is true, but I also didn’t find this one until after the previous post.
The WP is reporting the death of Madeleine LeBeau at the age of 92.
Ms. LeBeau played Yvonne, the girlfriend Rick throws over. She’s also in my favorite scene from what is one of my favorite movies ever:
I believe Ms. LeBeau is the teary eyed woman about 1:30 in, the one who isn’t Bergman and isn’t holding the guitar. Interestingly, Ms. LeBeau’s then-husband, Marcel Dalio, was Emil the croupier (“Your winnings, sir.”)
Ms. LeBeau made her screen debut in a 1939 drama, “Young Girls in Trouble.”
One of her last film roles was in “8 1/2”.
Edited to add 5/17: NYT obit.
Obit watch: May 15, 2016.
May 15th, 2016Katherine Dunn followups: A/V Club. NYT.
Harlan Ellison, the science fiction author and screenwriter, hailed it as “transformative.”
Julius La Rosa, who was a noted singer of the 1950s, but is perhaps most famous for being fired on the air by Arthur Godfrey.
On Oct. 19, 1953 — 23 months after Mr. La Rosa’s debut — Mr. Godfrey retaliated in a morning segment heard only on the radio. Mr. La Rosa had just finished singing “Manhattan” when Mr. Godfrey delivered the sentence in his solemn foghorn voice.
“That was Julie’s swan song,” he said.
…
The dismissal stunned Mr. La Rosa and the Godfrey audiences, whose reaction was largely negative. Most media critics also chastised Mr. Godfrey, whose avuncular image began to crumble.
Kind of a day for followup.
May 13th, 2016Back in February of 2012, I noted the firing of APD officer Michelle Gish, who was accused of striking a restrained woman who had spit on her.
Officer Gish’s firing was upheld by the police arbitrator. But she’s been suing the city. Her lawsuit was initially dismissed, but on Wednesday the 3rd Court of Appeals overturned the dismissal and returned her case to district court.
Why?
Another officer, Jose Robledo, was also fired at the same time for lying about the incident.
…Gish’s lawyers said the city acted improperly when it provided a document about Robledo’s firing to the person overseeing her arbitration.
The document was the ruling of another arbitrator who upheld Robledo’s termination. Gish’s attorney said they should have had the chance to cross-examine or challenge the arbitrator’s opinion. Instead, lawyers for the city submitted the opinion after Gish’s hearing had been concluded, the ruling said.
So basically, the city submitted into evidence a document from a different case and didn’t give Gish or her team a chance to reply. Seriously, this seems even to me like a naughty no-no.
Well, isn’t this interesting?
May 13th, 2016The Harris County DA’s office is apparently going to drop the murder charges against Chimene Onyeri.
You may remember Mr. Onyeri as the “person of interest” in the shooting of Judge Julie Kocurek. (Previously.)
Why are the charges being dropped? Reply hazy, ask again later. But:
1)
2)
This is still breaking and much of it is speculative, but it is a curious development. Why would the HCDA’s office drop a murder charge, just so Travis County could go after an alleged judge shooter? Was the murder charge weak to begin with, and is the evidence in the judge shooting better? Is is more politically palatable to go after him for shooting at (but not killing) the judge rather than killing a regular citizen? He’s more than likely going to die in prison no matter what. (Assuming he is convicted: Onyeri is at least entitled to some presumption of innocence.)
Poor, poor, pitiful Maywood (take 2).
May 13th, 2016You remember Maywood, don’t you? The city that was so pathetic, they turned over their day-to-day operations to Bell? Which started the chain of events that ended up bringing down the kleptocracy of Bell?
Guess what?
…
…
Some in Maywood look with sadness at the spectacle and what it says about the city’s leadership. Neighboring cities such as Bell, Vernon and Cudahy have had to enact reforms in the face of criminal investigations, recalls and threats of disincorporation from the state Legislature, but Maywood has not faced a similar reckoning.
“The reality is Maywood has always been forgotten,” said City Clerk Gerardo Mayagoitia. “No one ever wants to look at Maywood because we’re such a small community, and yet there’s so much corruption here that never stops. No one puts a stop to it.”
Obit watch: May 13, 2016.
May 13th, 2016Katherine Dunn, noted author (Geek Love) and boxing aficionado.
One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing sounds like a book I might be interested in. (Short shameful confession: I haven’t read Geek Love.)
Hattip: Lawrence, who also brings us a vital safety tip.
Obit watch: May 12, 2016.
May 12th, 2016I know a lot of people who loved “Beakman’s World” and anybody who teaches science to children is doing the lords work, as far as I’m concerned. Thing I didn’t know: Church was also Christo’s webmaster.
Not technically a firing, but…
May 12th, 2016…Scott Skiles out as head coach of the Orlando Magic.
Skiles coached for one season, and the Magic went 35-47.
But the team started the year 19-13, and Skiles felt the team’s inability to recover during an awful January in which they went 2-12 was indicative of an overall softness within the team and a lack of a professional mindset.
One of the disagreements between Skiles and the Magic front office was about the team’s point guard situation. Hennigan and the front office regarded — and still regard — Elfrid Payton as the franchise’s point guard of the future. Skiles did not.
Obit watch: May 10, 2016.
May 10th, 2016I’ve been meaning to note this for the past few days.
Last Friday, the NYT ran an obituary for Donald W. Duncan. Mr. Duncan was a former member of the Special Forces in Vietnam: he became disillusioned after his return to the United States, and became a fairly prominent anti-war activist:
In an America torn by protests against the war in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Duncan was often in the news, although not as prominently as the pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, the Roman Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan or the actress Jane Fonda, who was photographed laughing and applauding on an antiaircraft gun in Hanoi. (Daniel Berrigan died on April 30.)
But in 1966, well before the Tet offensive and the My Lai massacre stirred national discontent, Mr. Duncan was one of the first returning veterans to portray the war as a moral quagmire that had little to do with fighting the spread of Communism, as American leaders were portraying it.
Sergeant Duncan, who went to war convinced it was an anti-Communist crusade, ended his Special Forces duty a changed man. A 10-year veteran, he rejected an offer of an officer’s commission and left the Army. Back home, he became a fierce critic of the war, writing articles and a memoir and speaking at rallies across the country with the singer Joan Baez, the writer Norman Mailer and the comedian Dick Gregory.
But that’s not why I wanted to note Mr. Duncan’s passing. Remember I said the NYT ran the obit last Friday?
Mr. Duncan passed away on March 25, 2009. Yes, seven years ago. I can’t think of a longer gap between a death and an obit in the paper of record. Randall Dale Adams was about nine months, and I think he was the previous record holder.
Also, and more recent: William Schallert. There’s a photo and caption in that obit that make me smile: you’ll know it when you see it.
Quote of the day.
May 4th, 2016Have you noticed that in military history no regular army has ever been able to deal with a properly organized guerrilla force? If we use the regular army in Algeria, it can only end in failure. I’d like France to have two armies: one for display, with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, fanfares, staffs, distinguished and doddering generals, and dear little regimental officers who would be deeply concerned with their general’s bowel movements or their colonel’s piles: an army that would be shown for a modest fee on every fairground in the country.
The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage battledress, who would not be put on display but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That’s the army in which I should like to fight.
—The Centurions, Jean Lartéguy
Many years ago, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a teenage boy, Soldier of Fortune magazine sold merchandise, including posters.
There were two that I kind of wanted: one was a poster of the classic Thompson submachine gun ad. I’m still looking for that, if anyone has any leads…
The other was a variant of Lartéguy’s quote above. I was struck at the time by his distinction between the two armies, and yes, that’s the army in which I should like to fight as well.
Now I’m actually reading the book that quote came from, and I’m growing quite fond of Raspéguy and his band of merry men. I’ve just reached the end of book two, where the colonel gets the band back together: he assembles his fellow POWs from the Indochina war and tells them:
I’ve just been given command of the 10th Colonial Parachute Regiment, the most useless bunch of s.o.b.s in the whole French army, the rejects from every other paratroop unit.
I know this is going to end badly for everyone: we’re talking about French Algeria, after all. But I expect the rest of this ride is going to be fun.
Good news, everyone!
May 2nd, 2016Liberace is back!
Well, more specifically, his cars are back. The Liberace Garage at the Hollywood Cars Museum is displaying a group of them.
You may remember that at least some of these cars were on display at the now tragically closed Liberace Museum.
Obit watch: April 30, 2016.
April 30th, 2016I found out yesterday that Tom Deeb passed away about a month ago. I had not seen this previously reported: apparently, I should be reading more blogs.
For those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Deeb, he was the founder of Hi-Point and designer of their firearms.
I actually discovered this in a moderately amusing way. Yesterday, RoadRich and I had the chance to tour the Austin Police Department’s Forensics Lab as part of our CPA course.
One of the stops on our tour was the firearms and toolmarks lab, and we got to spend a few minutes talking with one of the examiners. I want to go out drinking with this guy, but I digress. I asked him how much truth there was to the old movie/TV show cliche, “The bullet has six lands and grooves and a right hand twist, so it’s got to be a Smith and Wesson or a Taurus…”
He commented that yes, generally, they can at least narrow things down to two or three makes of weapons, and sometimes they can do even better than that. Paraphrasing as closely as I remember: “If we see one with nine, we KNOW that it’s a Hi-Point, because TOM DEEB ALWAYS HAS TO DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY THAN EVERYONE ELSE!”
After the tour, RoadRich and I went to lunch, and got to talking about this. So I did some searching on my phone and found this recent profile of Hi-Point and Mr. Deeb from the American Rifleman. Turns out there’s more to it than Mr. Deeb just wanting to be different:
(And I know it is trendy to sneer at Hi-Point, but: the guys at Tex-Guns used to tell people when they asked about Hi-Points, “We’ve sold hundreds of them, and we’ve only had one, maybe two, come back to us for repair.” Another take.)
(And if you find someone on Gunbroker selling a Model 19 for $125, please let me know. I already have two (edited to add 5/1: three, actually: I forgot about the Ranger gun, but I don’t shoot that one), but at that price, I’d buy one and give it to a friend.)
Totally random thought.
April 28th, 2016Inspired by this:
Now that Prince is dead, he can get his own stamp. And given the way things are going with the Post Office and the Stamp Advisory Committee, it probably isn’t going to take ten years, either.
Of course, the Prince stamp will have to be a “4Ever” stamp.
Cop watch.
April 28th, 2016Two quick notes:
Remember the Tulsa Sheriff’s Office reserve deputy who thought his gun was a taser and ended up killing a guy last April?
Guilty of second-degree manslaughter.
Followup to the latest Art Watch: I usually don’t link to Statesman editorials, but I’m making an exception in this case. This one contains Chief Acevedo’s response to the reprimand, and the “he did not find any violation of APD or city policy” memo from the city manager.
In other news, it seems at least some members of the city council are not pleased…with the city manager.
Council Member Don Zimmerman said it was that lack of transparency that has led to his growing desire for Ott to be fired.
“When the city manager notified us, he didn’t even bother to attach the same documents that were sent to the media,” Zimmerman said. “I call that secrecy.”