Ken Berry, noted television actor. (“Mama’s Family”, “Mayberry R.F.D.”, “Dr. Kildare”, and he did a bunch of work on “Fantasy Island”, among his other credits.)
Yeah, I was going to put up the “F Troop” opening credits, but you know what? The paper of record beat me to it.
Mike McCarthy out as head coach of the Green Bay Packers.
The Pack is not exactly noted for random coach shuffles, but McCarthy was 4-7-1 this season, lost to Arizona on Sunday, and Green Bay is pretty much out of the playoffs for the second season in a row.
McCarthy is 125-77-2 overall in 13 seasons, 10-8 in the playoffs, and has one Super Bowl win (and three NFC Championship losses) to his credit.
I don’t think he’s a bad coach, and someone’s going to be lucky to get him. But it does seem like it just wasn’t working out in Green Bay.
Terry Bowden done as coach of the University of Akron Zips. 35-52 overall, 4-8 (2-6 in conference) this season.
Lady Trumpington (Jean Alys Campbell-Harris).
She was a member of the House of Lords from 1980 to 2017, and held various other governmental positions.
But she gets her obit linked here because she was one of the Bletchley Park codebreakers.
This month, she was among a group of Bletchley Park veterans awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor, for their contributions to the liberation of France.
“Oh, I had such fun in Paris after the war,” she said after receiving the medal in a ceremony at her home. “While this award recognized my time at Bletchley, I still find it difficult to discuss my time there, as we were taught to never talk about it.”
…
During her husband’s tenure at the Leys School in Cambridge, Lady Trumpington kept up her society habits. “I smoked and drank and did everything naughty,” she said.
Once, when presenting awards to Leys athletes, she jumped fully clothed into the school’s swimming pool, followed by the students. “My husband was furious,” she said.
NFL announcers are maroons. At least, according to Gregg Easterbrook.
Why?
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
For the historical record: Stephen Hillenburg, creator of “SpongeBob SquarePants”.
Jeeez. 57 is way too young. Also, ALS stinks.
For the historical record, because I really have nothing to say about the man: Bernardo Bertolucci.
He was a personal hero of mine, but I never met him or even saw him perform. Somehow, it seems like he never came through Austin. (A friend of mine told me a great story about seeing him live: I hope that person will post that story on their own blog.)
I’ve said before that my three favorite magicians are Penn, Teller, and Ricky Jay. But I admired Jay as a magic historian as well.
NYT. The legendary New Yorker profile.
It is the Daileys’ impression—a perception shared by other dealers in rare books and incunabula—that Jay spends a higher proportion of his disposable income on rare books and artifacts than anyone else they know. His friend Janus Cercone has described him as “an incunable romantic.”
“Probably, no matter how much money he had, he would be overextended bibliomaniacally—or should the word be ‘bibliographically’? Anyway, he’d be overextended,” William Dailey has said. “The first time I met him, I recognized him as a complete bibliomaniac. He’s not a complete monomaniac about books on magic, but within that field he is remarkably focussed. His connoisseurship is impeccable, in that he understands the entire context of a book’s emergence. He’s not just interested in the book’s condition. He knows who printed it, and he knows the personal struggle the author went through to get it printed.”
I don’t know what else I can say, except that the world is a smaller, colder, and less interesting place today.
How about that Chiefs-Rams game on Monday night?
If you didn’t like the Chiefs at Rams game, then you don’t like football.
And didn’t someone write something a while back about how ESPN gets stuck with bad games?
After the jump, the rest of this week’s TMQ…
Catching up:
Bob McNair, owner of the Houston Texans. NYT.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Does his family sell the team for tax reasons? If so, do they sell it to someone in Houston? Who? Tillman Fertitta?
Nicolas Roeg, noted director. The only thing of his I’ve watched is “The Man Who Fell To Earth” back over thirty years ago. (Lawrence, last night: “How long was the version you watched? Two hours or three?” Me: “I think it was four days.”) I just bought “Don’t Look Now” on Criterion (but we’re saving that for next October), and I’ve had the DVD of “Walkabout” for quite a while now but haven’t watched it…
Larry Fedora fired as head coach at the University of North Carolina.
UNC was 2-9 this season and 3-9 last year. Fedora was 45-43 overall in seven seasons, and 28-28 in conference.
Kliff Kingsbury is apparently done at Texas Tech, though this is being couched as “sources say”. There was supposed to be a press conference an hour ago.
35-40 overall in six seasons and 19-35 in Big 12 games.
The Red Raiders lost to Baylor 35-24 on Saturday, ending their third consecutive losing season and fourth in five years.
Under Kingsbury, the Red Raiders also failed to break .500 every year in Big 12 play, extending that streak to nine seasons in a row.
Andrew Fitzgerald passed away last week at the age of 87.
There’s a chance you may have heard of Mr. Fitzgerald. He was the last surviving member of the four man crew of the Coast Guard lifeboat CG-36500.
At 5:50 AM on February 18, 1952, the oil tanker Pendleton broke in half off Cape Cod during a severe storm. The crew of the CG-36500 went out and rescued 32 out of 33 men off the stern half of the ship. (One man drowned during the rescue, and the eight men who were in the bow were also lost at sea.)
There are a lot of people who think this is one of the greatest rescues in the history of the Coast Guard. I can’t do it justice here. You should really go read the entire obituary. There’s also a 2016 Disney film (which I haven’t seen), “The Finest Hours”, based on the book by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman.
In 2002, a 50th-anniversary reunion of the rescue crew was held at the historic Mariners House in Boston’s North End. The four also returned to Chatham for an outing on the CG-36500. Mr. Maske died in 2003, Mr. Livesey in 2007 and Mr. Webber in 2009.
The inscription on their Coast Guard medals read, “In testimony of heroic deeds in saving life from the perils of water.”
She was most famous as Harriet Oleson, Nellie’s mother on “Little House on the Prairie”. But she did have a bit of a career before that: an uncredited role in “On the Waterfront”, guest shots on “Emergency”, “Ironside”…
…and, yes, she was in two episodes of “Mannix”: “The World Between” and “Run Till Dark”.
A few things I’ve stumbled across over the past couple of days:
“I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It.” In which the author visits 30 cities, eats 330 burgers, names a burger place in Portand as having the best burger in the country…and five months later, the places closes.
I like this story: it’s a good discussion of the impact of criticism on dining establishments, especially smaller ones. But it’s also frustrating: as it turns out, there was more going on with the burger place than just simply being named “best burger in the country”.
Recently retweeted by Popehat:
Okay. History time!
You’ve probably seen photos of Commonwealth war cemeteries, with rows of white graves. They’re heartbreaking images.
What you DON’T see are the thousands of small, tragic stories on each gravestone.
So I’m going to share some with you here. /1 #history #WW1 pic.twitter.com/wr3ucIyMYZ
— John Bull (@garius) October 5, 2018
I don’t like and don’t read the Huffington Post. But this (also by way of Popehat):
Glybera is a drug developed in Canada. It’s a hugely effective treatment for a rare genetic condition, lipoprotein lipase disorder. People with this disorder can’t metabolize fat. Their blood literally turns white from all the suspended fat in their bloodstream.
One round of treatment with Glybera can fix this genetic condition. Only 31 people have ever been treated with the drug, and it is no longer available.
Why? One possible reason: a round of treatment costs one million dollars. (But a round of treatment, as far as anyone’s been able to determine, is a permanent cure. This is a drug that literally edits genes.) And this isn’t a “oh, health care in the US stinks” story: the drug was only used in Canada and Europe, pretty much on an experimental basis, before it was pulled.
On the historic significance of “Hee Haw”:
A few words on Hee Haw, following Roy Clark’s passing…
It is, possibly, one of the most interesting and important shows in American television history.
Really.
I’m not talking about its jokes or production. Many other things made it interesting and important.
Here goes…
— Gabe Bullard (@gbullard) November 16, 2018
In one of those odd historical coincidences, exactly ten years to the day after the Heidi Bowl…
…was the one and only telecast of “The Stars Wars Holiday Special”.