Author John Maxtone-Graham.
Safe Return Doubtful: The Heroic Age of Polar Exploration
Noted:
And:
Obit watch: July 8, 2015.
July 8th, 2015“I think we need to kill more people. … I think the death penalty should be used more often.”
July 8th, 2015That quote is from Dale Cox, acting district attorney of Caddo Parish, Louisiana.
There’s an interesting profile of Mr. Cox in today’s NYT. I’ve observed before that my feelings about the death penalty are complicated, but ultimately I believe some people deserve to die at the hands of the state. With that said, there are some things in the NYT article that I think are worth highlighting.
…
“Hey, Bob. Wanna bring the missus over tonight for a baby eating party? Great. Yeah, have Marlene bring her potato salad.”
…
And here’s an interesting little bit of trivia:
Reading that, I’m wondering if these were actual “machine guns”, or NYT defined “machine guns”. And I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: we’ve gone past peak zombie.
Wings clipped.
July 3rd, 2015The St. Louis Cardinals fired director of scouting Chris Correa yesterday.
Why do I bring this up? Granted, it is sportsfirings.com, but I don’t cover every minor executive firing.
But this is special. Correa is apparently the team’s first sacrifice in the great hacking scandal.
St. Louis attorney Jim Martin, a former federal prosecutor who is conducting the Cardinals’ internal investigation, declined to say if Correa’s dismissal was linked to the FBI case.
However, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Correa acknowledged breaking into the database to determine whether the Astros had stolen proprietary data from the Cardinals.
If he actually did admit “breaking into the database”, I think being fired is probably the least of his problems…
Quotes of the day.
July 3rd, 2015You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#21 in a series)
July 1st, 2015“…Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.”
Yes, I am chortling.
Indicted former California Democratic State Senator Leland “Uncle” Yee will soon be convicted former California Democratic State Senator Leland “Uncle” Yee.
More from the SFChron:
You may recall that Yee was a gun control advocate, and was honored by the Brady bunch.
Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!
The racketeering charge is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
This appears to be the Federal statutory maximum sentence. As we all should know by now, this figure is misleading. But:
And the judge can ignore those requests and recommendations.
The important question: what of Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow? Still awaiting trial, but the judge “asked prosecutors to include Chow, who is still in custody, in the next group scheduled for trial.”
Related question that you may have been wondering about: does the plea deal mean that Yee is going to roll on Chow? I can’t deny it: I love using the phrase “Yee is going to roll on Chow”. But:
The Ghee Kung Tong was Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow’s organization, which is described as “…as a racketeering enterprise that trafficked in drugs, weapons and stolen goods” in the Federal charges against Chow.
Edited to add: Thanks to Ken at Popehat for linking to convicted former California Democratic State Senator Leland “Uncle” Yee’s plea agreement. I apparently can’t copy or paste stuff from the plea agreement PDF, so I’ll just note that Yee specifically admits to the gun running charges in his plea.
Have you ever said to yourself…
June 29th, 2015…”Self, I wonder what it’s like to take photos with a three foot long, 36 pound, $180,000, 1,200mm camera lens?”
Don’t even think about taking a selfie. It will not focus on anything closer than about 46 feet.
I wish this had been a better article. It really doesn’t talk as much about the actual process of shooting with the lens as I’d like, and I’m not all that impressed with two out of three of the photos. But I still think it’s worth linking, even if it doesn’t push all of my photo geek buttons.
(Also, this is a used lens. For the record, and because I’m a Nikon guy, here’s their “equivalent” lens.)
Obit watch: June 29, 2015.
June 29th, 2015Chris Squire, bass player for Yes. A/V Club.
Walter Shawn Browne, noted chess grandmaster.
Finally, Red Mascara. Mr. Mascara wrote a song, “I’m From New Jersey” in 1960 and spent the next 55 years on a quixotic quest to have it made the official state song.
After action report: Spokane, WA.
June 27th, 2015The Smith and Wesson Collector’s Association annual symposium was in Spokane this year.
Quick random thoughts.
June 26th, 20151.
For me, the most amazing part of this breaking story is: grape-flavored gin exists? Because that just sounds god-awful, and I say that as someone who likes regular gin.
2. Apropos of nothing in particular (no, really), I’m thinking I’d like to own a Spiro Agnew watch. But it would have to be one that works: I’m not going to wear a broken wristwatch.
Random notes: June 26, 2015.
June 26th, 2015Obit watches: Patrick Macnee. A/V Club. LAT.
Phil “Nick Danger” Austin, founding member of the Firesign Theater, passed away on the 18th, but the paper of record just got around to running his obit.
Shepard Fairey has been charged with two counts of “malicious destruction of property” for tagging buildings in Detroit.
Two things from the WP that kind of tickled my fancy:
1. How much water do California pot growers use? The answer is: well, that’s hard to quantify, for obvious reasons. But a group of researchers have made an attempt to come up with a number, and their estimate is that pot growing uses about the same amount of water as almond growing.
(Do I need a “Fish” category?)
And speaking of things that delight me…
June 24th, 2015…I am absurdly happy to learn, by way of a comment in an article at the A/V Club, that Shout! Factory is issuing DVDs of both “The Bold Ones: The Senator” and “The Bold Ones: The Protectors“.
I’m sure I’ve written about this before (and some of you may remember it first hand) but: “The Bold Ones” was one of those wheel shows. (The other parts were “The Lawyers” and “The New Doctors”.) When RTN was an over-the-air network in Austin, they used to run “The Bold Ones” episodes on weekends; I recorded all that I could, but they kept running the same ones over and over, and then the hard drive died, and then RTN went cable-only in Austin…
Anyway, Hal Holbrook was “The Senator”, trying to navigate Washington politics and advance his agenda. I’m excited about this one because the DVDs include the two part “A Continual Roar of Musketry”; I’ve never seen that episode, but Harlan Ellison praised this episode highly in one of the “Glass Teat” books, and I look forward to finally watching it.
“The Protectors” starred Leslie Neilsen as a conservative white chief of police in an unnamed midsized California town, and Hari Rhodes as the liberal black district attorney. Honestly, you can see a lot of where “Police Squad” came from in Neilsen’s performance. But there’s also some good stuff there: “Memo from the Class of ’76”, while it has a few unfortunate cliches, is also a surprisingly successful attempt to ask hard questions about the War on Drugs before that war was even declared.
Now, if we could just get “The New Doctors” and “The Lawyers” as well, I’d be a happy man.
Quote of the day.
June 24th, 2015I was proud of that first Sharps of mine…At first it used a 320-grain bullet, but I experimented with one a hundred grains heavier, and thereafter used the 420-grain projectile. It killed quicker. In making this change I didn’t sacrifice anything in velocity, because by then I had begun to use the English powder…and it added 10 to 30 percent efficiency to my shooting. After a year or two, having plenty of buffalo dollars in my jeans, I talked myself into believing I needed an extra rifle in reserve–so I bought two. [Emphasis added – DB] One was a .40-70-320–a light little gun for deer and antelope but too impotent for buff. The other was another .40-90-420. Both used bottle-necked cartridges; don’t ask me how I fell for that sort of thing after vowing I was off bottle-necks for life.
—buffalo hunter Frank Mayer, quoted in David Dary’s The Buffalo Book
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Seriously, it just tickles me to see the “well, I had some money, and I thought I needed a second one” justification being used as far back as the 1870s. Also, I love that throwaway line, “So I bought two,” and the “don’t ask me how I fell for that sort of thing”. I’m pretty sure anyone and everyone who’s a serious gun person and been around for a while is familiar with all of those.
(Heck, you’re welcome to name your favorite “don’t ask me how I fell for that”, “so I bought two”, or “well, I had some money…” justification in the comments.)
Incidentally, I was curious about the reference to “the English powder”. A quick Google search turned up what looks like an interesting ebook, though I haven’t had time to go through all of it yet: “A memoir on gunpowder” by John Braddock, published in 1832. This looks to be one of the earliest extant books on methods for making and testing gunpowder, and falls squarely into “quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore” territory.
Obit watch: June 24, 2015.
June 24th, 2015For the record: Don Featherstone.
Frances Kroll Ring has died at the age of 99. The significance of this is that she was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s personal secretary at the end of his life, while he was working on “The Last Tycoon”.
Obit watch: June 23, 2015.
June 23rd, 2015This has been semi-well reported elsewhere (except, oddly, in the paper of record); James Horner. (Edited to add 2: NYT obit. In fairness, it appears that they were waiting for official confirmation from Horner’s people that he was actually flying the plane; other sources seemed to be basing their reports on “well, it was his plane, and he hasn’t called anybody since it went down to say ‘I’m alive!’, so…”)
Dick Van Patten: LAT. A/V Club. (Edited to add: NYT.)
(He was in “Soylent Green”? I need to watch that movie “again”, as I’ve only ever seen parts of it in the “edited for television” version.)
Quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore (#3 in a series).
June 21st, 2015I’ve been taking a bit of a break from Half-Price recently.
It wasn’t just that I was trying to save money for my trip, though that was part of it. (And I hope to have the report up in the next few days.) It was also that I kept going and not coming out with anything I wanted. The few things I did find that I wanted were somewhat overpriced in my opinion.
So I bided my time. Mom wanted to go last week to sell some books at the South Half-Price, so we went. And the drought broke: I picked up a stack of African hunting books (Peter Capstick’s Africa: A Return To The Long Grass
(I miss Capstick. And yes, this does mean you will probably hear me ramble some more about Ruark. But not in this post.)
Emboldened by my recent success, I bopped over to the central Half-Price this afternoon. It isn’t a bad way to kill some time in an air-conditioned environment. And the latest entry in this series fell into my hands…
===
Back when I was taking “Modern Revolutions” at St. Ed’s (and if you’re out there somewhere, Dr. Sanchez, I hope you’re having a wonderful life), I noticed that Kermit Roosevelt Jr. seemed to pop up in a lot of places in the Middle East during the 1950s. I believe I made the observation in class that someone really needed to write a good biography of Kim, especially now that a lot of older material has been declassified.
I actually got that wish late in 2013 (though the book was a Christmas 2014 present from my beloved and indulgent sister) with the publication of Hugh Wilford’s excellent book, America’s Great Game: The CIAs Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East
I wasn’t really aware, until I read Wilford’s book, that Archie was almost as deeply involved with the CIA and the Middle East as Kim was. So when I saw this on the shelf at Half-Price today, I pulled it down for a closer look.
It isn’t a great copy: Lawrence would probably turn his nose up at it, as the dust jacket has a few small tears and some shelf wear. I wouldn’t call it much better than “Good”, and you can get copies on Amazon in “Very Good” condition for $2.50 or so (plus shipping). I paid $10 plus tax for this one; I do believe it is a first printing from 1988, two years before Archie died. Maybe I am a sucker, but it has one thing going for it that the other copies don’t:
“For Douglas Brinkley–
With great admiration, a book I think you will enjoy – by someone I wish you could have met-
Fondly-
Lucky Roosevelt
Aug. 1997”
Lucky Roosevelt was Archie’s wife, to whom the book is dedicated.
It may not be much to other people, but it pushes a couple of my buttons. And I leave you with the quote of the day:
I have always found yogurt an excellent preventative against bacterial dysentery.
Now I’d like to find a copy of Kim’s book, Countercoup
