Trent Baalke is out as general manager of the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Sounds sort of like a combined resignation-firing, so I’m chalking it up as a firing.
Firings watch.
January 22nd, 2025Obit watch: January 22, 2025.
January 22nd, 2025Jules Feiffer, artist. He was perhaps most famous as a cartoonist for the “Village Voice”, but he also did some movie and theater work.
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In May 1997, Mr. Feiffer ended his affiliation with The Village Voice over a salary dispute. “It’s not that I’ve slipped,” he said at the time. “It’s that I’m too expensive.” (In April 2008, he returned for a one-shot, full-page take on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.)
Later in life he derived great pleasure from writing and drawing children’s books, some in collaboration with his daughter Kate, among them “The Man in the Ceiling” (1993), “Bark, George” (1999), “By the Side of the Road” (2002), “The Daddy Mountain” (2004) and “A Room With a Zoo” (2005). A 2010 reunion project with Mr. Juster, “The Odious Ogre,” was warmly reviewed.
Garth Hudson, of the Band.
During its peak, the Band was famously a collaborative operation informed by the songwriting and barbed guitar playing of Robbie Robertson and the soulful singing and musicianship of Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. But critics and his fellow band members agreed that Mr. Hudson played an essential role in raising the group to another level entirely.
Mr. Robertson, quoted in Barney Hoskyns’s 1993 book, “The Band: Across the Great Divide,” called him “far and away the most advanced musician in rock ’n’ roll.” “He could just as easily have played with John Coltrane or the New York Symphony Orchestra as with us,” Mr. Robertson said.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#140 in a series)
January 18th, 2025Remember Sheng Thao? The former mayor of Oakland? “Former” because she got tossed out of office in a recall election in November?
She was indicted on Friday. Also indicted: Andre Jones, who the NYT describes as her “boyfriend”, David Trung Duong, and Andy Hung Duong. David Duong is the head of a local waste management company, and Andy is his son.
Patrick D. Robbins, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, said on Friday that Ms. Thao in October 2022 had agreed to extend a city contract with the waste company, California Waste Solutions, buy housing from the Duongs and use her influence to help them in exchange for a campaign mail effort and side payments that would benefit her and Mr. Jones.
California Waste Solutions then spent $75,000 on an attack mailer that helped Ms. Thao’s campaign in the 2022 mayoral election, prosecutors said. After Ms. Thao took office, the company paid $95,000 to Mr. Jones for a “no-show” job and had promised additional payments to the couple in exchange for Ms. Thao’s influence at City Hall, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors alleged that Ms. Thao followed through by taking steps to help companies owned by the Duongs and by appointing a high-level city official that they had selected.
The charges against her are pretty much standard. You got your mail fraud, you got your wire fraud, you got your bribery and conspiracy.
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Obit watch: January 18, 2025.
January 18th, 2025Jean Jennings, automotive writer. I remember her from back in the day when I was reading Car and Driver (she went by Jean Lindamood at the time).
Mrs. Jennings was hired at Car and Driver by David E. Davis Jr., a renowned figure in automotive journalism. In 1986, he took her with him after Rupert Murdoch offered to support a new type of car magazine, Automobile, which was aimed at more discerning readers and featured writers like P.J. O’Rourke, David Halberstam and Jim Harrison. Mrs. Jennings proved more than capable of keeping up with them.
“She and David were the only ones writing anything other than fanboy notes,” Kathleen Hamilton, a childhood friend who later worked for her at Automobile, said in an interview. “It was enthusiast writing, and she brought adventure to the car-world reader.”
I sort of halfway read “Automobile”, by which I mean I mostly thumbed through it on the newsstands but never bought an issue. I think I had checked out of the car magazine scene by the time she became Mrs. Jennings.
She was 70, which seems awfully young to me these days. Alzheimer’s got her.
Obit watch: January 17, 2025.
January 17th, 2025As promised, David Lynch. NYT. This is the same THR obit link from yesterday, but I think they’ve substantially updated it since I originally posted.
David Lynch PSA for the New York City Department of Sanitation. (Hattip: NYPost.)
Roger Ebert’s one-star review of “Blue Velvet”.
Joan Plowright, actress. IMDB. I feel bad that I don’t have more to say about here, but I just don’t.
Nathalie Dupree, cookbook author and personality. She’s actually someone I’d heard of, but didn’t really have a lot of context for. The obit makes it sound like she would have been a fun person to know, more so in her Diet Coke days.
Ms. Dupree had a particular blend of Southern hospitality and risqué charm. Over the course of her career she was called “the Julia Child of the South,” “the queen of Southern cooking” and “the anti-Martha Stewart.”
She shocked the host Katie Couric by ending an elegant entertaining segment on the “Today” show, in which she prepared an entire pork crown roast, by presenting a supermarket chocolate cake. She filmed episodes of her television show with a red AIDS ribbon pinned to her apron, a bold move in the 1980s, when conservative suburban women made up much of her audience.
“She is one of the few people in my life who seems more like a fictional character than a flesh-and-blood person,” the novelist Pat Conroy wrote in “The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes and Stories of My Life” (2009), after taking one of Ms. Dupree’s classes. “You never know where Nathalie is going with a train of thought; you simply know that the train will not be on time, will carry many passengers and will eventually collide with a food truck stalled somewhere down the line on damaged tracks.”
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Her early television shows, orchestrated solely by Ms. Graubart, were sponsored by a Southern flour company. Ms. Dupree wanted the kitchen segments to run with no edits. With a smear of flour on her face, she might leave ingredients half prepared or forget to add them altogether. She wiped her hands on her apron a lot and once searched around for her diamond ring that had fallen off as she cooked.
“Whatever happens to me is going to happen to you,” she’d tell audiences after a mistake.
“She was a hot mess, and that’s what people loved her for,” Ms. Graubart, who coauthored “Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking” in 2012 with Ms. Dupree, said in a phone interview.
Random crankery (mostly gun books, a little gun stuff, a little electronic stuff).
January 16th, 2025I didn’t manage to get everything done that I wanted to get done during my extended vacation from work. In particular, gun crankery and gun books kind of went by the wayside, for reasons of time and weather.
The gun crankery is still coming. And a thought occurred to me the other day: I can actually do some quick gun book crankery, because I have three new gun books in the stack and can just point folks to those books online. Don’t need to pull out the bibliographies or take pictures. Yes, it is lazy, and yes, there will be less lazy gun book crankery coming. Consider this a stopgap.
More seriously, I do think these new books are worth writing about and promoting to my readers.
In order to avoid disappointing my gun book buddies, I’m going to put the gun books up front. After those, I’m going to talk about one new gun-related item, and one new non-gun related item, so anyone who wants can skip over the non-book parts (or can skip to the non-book parts).
Obit watch: January 16, 2025.
January 16th, 2025This is breaking news, but: David Lynch. I wouldn’t ordinarily post anything this early, but I happened to be writing this obit watch when the news broke. Expect more tomorrow.
Bob Uecker. ESPN. IMDB. Baseball Reference.
Administrative note.
January 16th, 2025For the record, my plan is to update the various politician lists (city council, commissioners court, reps, senators) sometime after, but close to, January 20th.
I know some of these folks have been sworn in already, but waiting until after the 20th gives people a chance to get their web sites updated and things in order.
Obit watch: January 13, 2025.
January 13th, 2025Leslie Charleson, actress.
Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “Emergency!”, “Search”…
…and “Mannix”. (“A Chance at the Roses”, season 3, episode 16.)
Firings watch.
January 13th, 2025This is still breaking, but: Mike McCarthy is supposedly out as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys.
ESPN, who is attributing this to “a source”.
Obit watch: January 11, 2025.
January 11th, 2025Sam Moore, of Sam and Dave.
At their peak in the 1960s, Sam & Dave churned out rhythm-and-blues hits with a regularity rivaled by few other performers. When “Soul Man” topped the R&B charts and crossed over to No. 2 on the pop charts in 1967 (it also won a Grammy), its success helped open doors for other Black acts to connect with white audiences.
Sam & Dave’s live shows were so kinetic — they were known as the Sultans of Sweat and Double Dynamite — that even as charismatic a performer as Otis Redding was hesitant to be on the bill with them, for fear of being upstaged. Mr. Moore once spoke of his need to “liquefy” the audience before he considered a show a success.
“The strength of Sam & Dave,” he said, “was that we would do anything to please the audience.”
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(Dave Prater died in a car accident in 1988.)
Burning in Hell watch: James Arthur Ray. People who have been reading this blog for a long time may remember that name, as I covered his actions and the resulting criminal case early on.
Mr. Ray was a “self-help guru” who killed three people in a sweat lodge in Sedona, Arizona.
Mr. Ray packed about 50 people into a temporary structure made of a round wood frame covered in tarps, measuring about 25 feet in diameter and only five feet at the center. He poured gallons of water over fire-heated rocks, filling the lodge with hot steam.
Though he told participants they could leave at any time, many said later that they felt pressured by him to stay. Eventually the conditions inside grew unbearable, and the crowd flooded out; many people collapsed on the ground.
Someone called 911; one first responder later said that the scene looked like the site of a mass suicide. Twenty-one people were taken to the hospital.
Three of them died — James Shore and Kirby Brown were declared dead on arrival, while Liz Neumann died nine days later. Mr. Ray was arrested shortly afterward on manslaughter charges.
Mr. Ray was convicted of three counts of negligent homicide and sentenced to two years in prison.
“I am responsible,” he said about the sweat-lodge disaster.
At the end of the film, he added: “It had to happen, because it was the only way I could explore and learn and grow through the things that I’ve done. Am I drinking the Kool-Aid? Maybe, but the Kool-Aid works for me.”
Am I reading that right? Three people had to die in great agony so James Arthur Ray could “explore and learn and grow”?
Hell is too good for him.
(Obligatory note that it was Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid.)
–Roger Ebert
Firings watch.
January 10th, 2025On Tuesday, the Las Vegas Raiders fired Antonio Pierce as head coach.
Yesterday, they fired Tom Telesco as general manager. One season, 4-13.
In other news, Sean Dyche is out as manager of Everton. Everton is apparently a soccer team.
(I would have sworn I posted this yesterday, but I just found this in my drafts. Apologies.)
Noted.
January 10th, 2025This came across Greg Ellifritz‘s “Weekend Knowledge Dump” a few weeks ago, and I thought it was worth sharing:
“46 Things (and Counting) a Young Man Should Know”.
47. Carry a sharp knife, unless precluded by law or venue policy. It doesn’t have to be a machete or Bowie knife: even a small Swiss Army knife or pocketknife is worthwhile.
48. Carry a small flashlight. You can get ones that clip on your keychain and throw a surprising amount of light, and you have no idea how handy they are until you start using them.
Also by way of Mr. Ellifritz: “52 Things I Learned in 2024”.
And by way of Mike the Musicologist: “Big Pistols vs. Small Pistols”, by FotB (and official trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn.
Obit watch: January 10, 2024.
January 10th, 2025The NYT obit wants to attribute her career decline to her anti-gay views. But was that really the case? Or did her career go into eclipse because American musical tastes changed? I honestly don’t know.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#138 and #139 in a series)
January 9th, 2025Mike the Musicologist tipped me off to an interesting story from Louisiana.
Tyrin Truong is the mayor of Bogalusa. He’s 23, which makes him the youngest mayor in Bogalusa’s history, and one of the youngest ever in the state.
And he got busted on Tuesday for drug trafficking.
But, apparently, no blow. Which is kind of disappointing, because:
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“unauthorized use of a moveable”?
Even before officially becoming mayor, Truong did not shy away from political battles and controversies. As mayor-elect, he pushed for the resignation of the Bogalusa police chief after a Black man died in the department’s custody.
During his tenure he encouraged law enforcement to patrol more in Bogalusa, but also suggested the city could dissolve its 33-officer police force and transfer responsibilities to the Washington Parish Sheriff’s office to save money.
What kind of expenses?
The articles don’t specify if that was a down payment on a new Prius or an outright purchase of a used one. I did run the numbers, and that works out to $14.61 a pound for the bourbon steak tips. I don’t know if that’s a good price or not: my H-E-B app does not list steak tips (with or without bourbon) at my local store. I also can’t find “bourbon steak tips” online – I was thinking that might be something Omaha Steaks sells – but I did find lots of recipes for “bourbon” and “honey bourbon” steak tips online. Might be something worth trying.
Clasby also arranged for the city to pay over $38,000 to a New York consulting company owned by his friend, federal prosecutors said.
The consulting company didn’t provide any goods or services to Quincy, federal prosecutors said. Instead, Clasby’s friend cashed the city’s checks and gave Clasby the money at three separate places: A rest stop in Framingham, a ferry terminal in Bridgeport, Connecticut and at the friend’s New York apartment.
Okay, now you’re just being scummy instead of amusing. But we’ll always have the “signed, lacquered, framed portrait” and the studio recordings of his singing. Not that I’ve found those anywhere yet, but I’m sure prosecutors will be entering those into evidence and playing them for the jury.