(Also strict knife control, but mostly burrito control.)
(I have no joke here, I just like saying “deadly assault burritos”.)
(Insert your own “deadly assault burrito” joke here.)
You know what Kentucky needs?
July 6th, 2016Firing watch.
July 4th, 2016Why not drop your news on one of the slowest news days of the year?
Sheryl Swoopes was fired last night as head coach of the Loyola University women’s basketball team. Chicago Tribune. Chicago Sun-Times.
Her record over three seasons was 31-62, and 14-16 last season. But the problem doesn’t seem to have been her record:
More:
…
Players said Swoopes cried during halftime of games and during practices while imploring the team to play better and stormed out of the gym during practice several times, frustrated at their lack of execution. At one practice, multiple players said, Swoopes sat on a chair in silence the entire time.
Swoopes also shared with teammates personal information told to her in confidence, sources told the Tribune.
Ms. Swoopes termination comes at what is apparently the end of a three month long investigation by the university, though no details of that investigation have been released yet.
Obit watch: July 3, 2016.
July 3rd, 2016I’ve been running flat out for the better part of the past two days, and haven’t been near a real computer, so I want to get these up before I crash.
I really don’t have anything profound to add to the flood of Elie Wiesel appreciations. I haven’t read Night, though I know I probably should at some point.
Michael Cimino. I also haven’t watched a single Cimino movie, though I do have the Criterion director’s cut edition of “Heaven’s Gate”. I do plan to watch that at some point, but we watched “Spartacus” (also the Criterion edition) recently and thought that was long: “Heaven’s Gate” in the director’s cut is about 30 minutes longer. A/V Club.
Finally, Robin Hardy, director of the “good” (or maybe just “not batshit insane”) version of “The Wicker Man”.
Happy 3rd of July.
July 3rd, 2016Even though it is full of the usual anti-fireworks crapola we hear every year around this time – the same anti-fireworks propaganda that has been ruining the holiday and the country ever since I was in the single-digit age range – I wanted to note the NYT‘s “A History of Fireworks Mayhem on the Fourth of July” because:
- It starts off with the S.S. Kresge disaster in Cleveland.
- It quotes John Stark Bellamy II.
- And it cites They Died Crawling. As I say every time this comes up, I think that’s one of the best book titles ever, right up there with Coffin’s Got the Dead Guy on the Inside.
Today in journalism fraud.
July 1st, 2016Noted author Gay Talese (“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”, The Kingdom and the Power) has a new book coming out.
The Voyeur’s Motel is allegedly based on the diaries of a man named Gerald Foos. Mr. Foos owned a motel in Colorado, and claims that he constructed special walkways above the ceilings of some of the rooms so he could secretly watch his guests having sex.
Except there are some problems with the Foos story:
More:
If you can’t vouch for details, why did you write the book? Shouldn’t this have sent up some warning flags?
In a series of interviews, he expressed surprise, disappointment and anger to learn about the transactions. He said he had not been aware of them until a reporter asked him about it on Wednesday.
“The source of my book, Gerald Foos, is certifiably unreliable,” Talese said. “He’s a dishonorable man, totally dishonorable. . . . I know that. . . . I did the best I could on this book, but maybe it wasn’t good enough.”
The odd thing is, nobody seems to be talking about pulling the book. Yet.
Edited to add: And now Talese is disavowing his disavowal:
If I were a betting man, I’d bet money that there’s going to be even more information coming out that throws doubt on Foos and his claims, and that this will end badly for Talese, the book, and Grove Atlantic.
Obit watch: June 29, 2016.
June 29th, 2016So Cormac McCarthy isn’t dead.
However, Alvin “Future Shock” Toffler is.
“No serious futurist deals in ‘predictions,’” he wrote in the book’s introduction. “These are left for television oracles and newspaper astrologers.”
He advised readers to “concern themselves more and more with general theme, rather than detail.” That theme, he emphasized, was that “the rate of change has implications quite apart from, and sometimes more important than, the directions of change.”
(I’ve never actually read Future Shock. When it was first published, I was distracted by other things, like my binky: when I reached the age where I might have been able to appreciate it, it seemed…quaint. Perhaps I should fix this.)
I find this obit for Phil Parker oddly touching. Son of a Baptist preacher, drank for the first time in grad school at Harvard, ended up an alcoholic living on the streets of the Bowery, finally went to AA and got sober…
He stayed sober for 48 years. Cancer got him in the end.
Quote of the day.
June 29th, 2016Cormac McCarthy is alive and well and still doesn't care about Twitter.
— Penguin Random House (@penguinrandom) June 28, 2016
Happy Gavrilo Princip Day!
June 28th, 2016I let Bloomsday get past me this year. (I swear, next year, I will do the “Happy Bloomsday” cards.)
I didn’t want to let this one pass without note, though it took the NYT to remind me that today was the day.
As always, we tip our hat in the direction of great and good friend Guffaw, the originator of Gavrilo Princip Day. May he and the rest of my readers enjoy the rest of the holiday.
(As for myself, I plan to celebrate in a non-traditional fashion.)
Obit watch: June 28, 2016.
June 28th, 2016Bad day for sports.
Pat Summitt, University of Tennessee basketball coach. Knoxville News-Sentinel. ESPN.
She was only 64. Alzheimer’s sucks.
Buddy Ryan, one of the great NFL defensive coaches. ESPN.
Noted without comment:
And an update.
June 27th, 2016Somebody bring me some water…
June 27th, 2016Noted for the record (though I don’t think I ever did a full-blown “you’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena” on this one):
…
“tawdry”. A great word. And much like “gargantuan”, the opportunity rarely comes up to use it in a sentence.
110 years ago yesterday…
June 26th, 2016Missed it by that much.
On June 25, 1906, Harry Kendall Thaw, professional heir and nutcase, walked up to noted architect Stanford White on the roof of Madison Square Garden (during the opening night of something called “Mam’zelle Champagne”) and shot White in the head.
NYT coverage 1. NYT coverage 2.
When I call Thaw a “nutcase”. I mean that quite literally: historical evidence seems to show that he had a long history of mental problems, and that his enormously wealthy family spent a a great deal of money covering for him. Indeed, the Thaw trial is an early (though not the first) example of the interaction between great wealth and criminal justice.
It is also claimed that Thaw’s family spent a lot of money smearing White. Specifically, Thaw’s supposed motivation for the murder was that White had “ruined” Evelyn Nesbit when she was 16. Ms. Nesbit later went on to become Thaw’s wife: she supposedly told Thaw all about her affair with White, which drove Thaw crazier than he allegedly already was…
The end result was that Thaw went through two trials. The jury hung in the first one, and found him not guilty by reason of insanity in the second one. Thaw was sent to the Matteawan asylum for several years. In 1913, he walked out of the asylum and escaped into Quebec. He was eventually extradited back to the US, where he received a new sanity hearing, was found “not guilty and no longer insane”, and was released. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and confined again for beating a 19 year old boy. He was released in 1924 and died in 1947. Thaw obit from the NYT.
Evelyn Nesbit died in “relative obscurity” in 1967. NYT obit.
I actually had hopes and plans for doing a much longer and better post on this, but they didn’t pan out. I’ve had trouble laying my hands on the source material I wanted to find. (And I still haven’t been able to find out what gun Thaw used, alas.)
So I’m going to be a little lazy and point to:
The website for the American Experience documentary “Murder of the Century”. It does not have the film available for streaming, but it does have the transcript and background material.
The Thaw trials from Douglas Linder’s “Famous Trials” website. This is actually a website that I keep forgetting about, even though it has been around since 1995, so I’m glad to be able to bookmark it here. Professor Linder has spent the past 21 years documenting everything from the trial of Socrates through Thomas More, Aaron Burr, our old pal Big Bill Haywood, and all the way up to George Zimmerman. This isn’t the be-all end-all website for most of these trials, but it serves as a good jumping-off point if you want to do more research.
(If those NYT links don’t work for you, would you please send an email or leave a comment? I think they should work, but I’m not 100% sure.)
Obit watch: June 25, 2016.
June 25th, 2016Michael Herr, author of Dispatches. This is supposed to be one of the great Vietnam War books: I personally haven’t gotten around to reading it.
Things I did not know:
Bernie Worrell, legendary keyboard player.
Later on, of course, he played with the Talking Heads. I think this clip has some good shots of Mr. Worrell in action with the Heads:
Random notes: June 24, 2016.
June 24th, 2016The Baltimore Sun recalls a time when terrapin was “the signature delicacy of Maryland cuisine”.
(Linked here because: my favorite chapter in The Old Man and the Boy is towards the end, where the Old Man takes The Boy up to his friend’s in Maryland. They stop off along the way and have a proper meal of canvasback duck, terrapin stew, and various kinds of “iced tea” – this being at the height of Prohibition. So, yeah, I have a vague desire to try terrapin stew sometime.)
I intended to link this earlier in the week, but forgot until the On Taking Pictures podcast reminded me: 20×24 Studio is closing down “by the end of next year”.
The significance of this is that 20×24 is the home of the largest Polaroid camera ever made:
But Polaroid no longer produces instant film: the company bought “hundreds of cases” of the 20×24 film, and hoped to reverse engineer it:
Pavel Dmitrichenko is hoping to rebuild his ballet career, after being out of the dance scene for about two and a half years.
Why was he out? Injury? No, actually, he was in prison.
And why was he in prison? He was convicted of plotting the acid attack against Bolshoi Ballet director Sergei Filin.
Mr. Dmitrichenko now labels the whole affair pure fiction. It was all a plot, he said, by Mr. Filin and his allies in the Bolshoi to remove him from the scene because he was vocal about their corrupt practices and would not be intimidated.
The revisions spill out in dizzying, not to say implausible, succession: He never spoke to Mr. Zarutsky about Mr. Filin. He denied that he admitted as much in court. Ms. Vorontsova was not his girlfriend. He even raises doubts that there was any acid attack since Mr. Filin has little noticeable scaring and can drive, despite the seeming lack of an iris in one eye that he keeps hidden behind sunglasses.