Obit watch: July 31, 2025.

July 31st, 2025

Robert Wilson, “theater director, playwright and visual artist”, and a good Texas boy.

Time was an important element for Mr. Wilson, too. Where playwrights traditionally compressed time in their works, Mr. Wilson expanded it. His stage work “KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE,” which had its premiere in 1972 at the Festival of Arts in Shiraz, Iran, ran 168 hours and was presented over 10 days. Viewers were astonished and outraged to see actors taking hours to complete actions as simple as walking across the stage or slicing an onion.

…

By contrast, Mr. Wilson’s first foray into opera, and his first collaboration with Mr. Glass, “Einstein on the Beach” (1976), is a comparatively trim five-hour work. It has no plot, but its tableaux touches on nuclear power, space travel and even Einstein’s love of playing the violin. And while it has plenty of text — counting sequences, solfège syllables, the lyrics to the pop song “Mr. Bojangles” and sections of poetry and prose by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs — none of it is dialogue. The audience, free to leave and return during a performance, is presented with ideas about Einstein by inference and metaphor rather than directly.

…

“Einstein,” which had its premiere at the Festival d’Avignon in France in July 1976 and was staged at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York that November, has proved to be among the most durable works in Mr. Wilson’s and Mr. Glass’s catalogs. It has been recorded three times and revived regularly, with world tours in 1985, 1992 and 2012-15.

…

Mr. Wilson and Mr. Glass teamed up again, in 1984, to produce “The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down,” the fifth act, called “the Rome Section,” of what was to be a 12-hour opera, with other sections composed by Jo Kondo, David Byrne, Gavin Bryars and others. Because of funding problems, the full work was never produced. But Mr. Wilson and Mr. Glass went on to produce two more operas, “White Raven” and “Monsters of Grace” (both 1998). In 2022, Mr. Wilson produced “H-100 Seconds to Midnight,” a work inspired by the physicist Stephen Hawking, with texts by Etel Adnan and music by Mr. Glass and Dickie Landry.

…

Mr. Wilson’s other notable collaborations include Euripides’s “Alcestis” (1986) with Laurie Anderson; “Cosmopolitan Greetings” (1988) with Allen Ginsberg; a Spirituals recital, “Great Day in the Morning” (1982), and stagings of Schoenberg’s “Erwartung” (1995) and Schubert’s “Winterreise” (2001) for the soprano Jessye Norman; “The Old Woman” (2013) with the choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov and the actor Willem Dafoe; and “Bach 6 Solo,” a staging of Bach’s unaccompanied violin works, played by Jennifer Koh and choreographed by Ms. Childs.
He also worked several times with Lady Gaga, including one work at the Louvre in Paris in 2013 involving what he called “Video Portraits” of her.

Laura Dahlmeier.

Ms. Dahlmeier won the sprint and pursuit events in biathlon at the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and added a bronze in the individual event. In Germany, she had helped boost the popularity of the biathlon, a cross-country ski race in which participants also shoot at targets. She won five gold medals at the 2017 world championships in Hochfilzen, Austria, among a total of seven in her career.

She was 31, and died in a climbing accident in Pakistan.

Posted in Music, Sports, Thanks | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 29, 2025.

July 29th, 2025

Might as well start off my 16th year of “looking at obituaries and which coaches got fired“.

Ryne Sandberg. 65 seems a lot younger to me these days than it did in the past. MLB. Baseball Reference.

This amused me: the context is that Mr. Sandberg signed a contract in 1992 that paid him $28.4 million over four years, which was a lot of money at the time.

As Sports Illustrated put it at the time: “Sandberg is a shy, unassuming guy who is a lock for the Hall of Fame. He doesn’t drink, test positive, ram his wife’s car, kick the dog, walk out of camp or say dumb things to the press. The most controversial thing he does is boot a grounder every 25 games or so.”
On signing the extension, Sandberg remarked, “My face will be sore today from the smile.”
But other club owners weren’t grinning. “I’ve said for years that we’re headed for Armageddon,” Al Rosen, the general manager of the San Francisco Giants, told Sports Illustrated. “But now we’re past the gates. To the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Famine, Pestilence, Death and War — we have added a fifth: Unmitigated Greed. It’s going to do us all in. I can’t see baseball surviving this.”

Posted in Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

My blog is broken. Day 8.

July 28th, 2025

I was busy over the weekend and didn’t have a chance to follow-up with Bluehost. I was planning to do so tonight…

…but Bluehost emailed me! The direct message I sent this morning to Sachin Puri (“CEO @ Bluehost Group”) asking whose leg I had to hump to get some action on this ticket may have been a factor in that.

Summarizing, Bluehost’s latest theory is that: “a script is being terminated due to execution time limits, specifically during image processing handled by WordPress”. Which is actually a reasonable theory, and explains some things: if the script is being terminated because it takes too long to run, there’s probably a connection to server load, and that would explain why some people see the problem intermittently.

Options to Resolve

Resize images before uploading to reduce processing time. (recommended)

Disable image resizing via a plugin

Consider upgrading to a VPS or Dedicated plan, where you have full control over PHP limits and resource usage.

I’m not really interested in adding an “image resizing” step to my workflow, especially when this worked in the past without that step. I’m also not really interested in paying more money to get back to where I was.

Next Steps & Suggestions

To further isolate the issue, we recommend:

Retry the upload using WordPress to confirm if the problem persists on your end.

Which I would love to be able to do. But as I’ve mentioned to my readers, and as I told the Bluehost support rep, they’ve set the maximum file upload size for this instance to ZERO BYTES.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 28, 2025.

July 28th, 2025

Tom Lehrer was wrong.

We did not all go together when we go. He went first.

THR. NYT.

Shunsaku Tamiya, CEO of Tamiya Company.

For more than four decades, Mr. Tamiya led the company that bore his family’s name, turning it into one of the world’s largest makers of build-it-yourself plastic model kits of racecars and military vehicles. Since producing its first such kit in 1960, of the Japanese World War II battleship Yamato, Tamiya Co. has become a globally known brand that also produces remote-controlled cars.

…

The company, which was renamed Tamiya in 1984, also won customers because of the meticulous accuracy of its kits. Mr. Tamiya visited military museums around the world to research archives and take pictures of tanks, warships and aircraft. At locations where photography wasn’t allowed, he memorized the details, recording them in a notebook afterward.
During the Cold War, he got his first up-close look at Soviet tanks at a museum in Israel, which had captured them from Arab countries during the Six-Day War.
His company also built model kits of racing cars as well as radio-controlled cars. To make a miniature replica of a Porsche 911 that was perfect down to the shape and placement of the engine, he bought one of the expensive German sports cars.
He did this “not to drive it, but to use it as a reference,” Mr. Tamiya wrote in a memoir. “I brought the 911 into my garage and disassembled everything that could be disassembled.”

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Very short random gun crankery.

July 28th, 2025

One of the things Mike the Musicologist and I did over the weekend was to make a stop in Canyon Lake and go to the local grocery store.

Not because we were hungry, but because we wanted to try out the ammunition vending machine.

They had rifle, handgun, and shotgun ammunition. We didn’t look at the shotgun ammo. The rifle ammo was: .300 Blackout, .223, and Aguila .22 LR ammo. The handgun ammo was 9mm, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP.

We tried to buy one box of .45 and two boxes of .22 LR. The prices weren’t great, but we were treating this as an experiment.

Unfortunately, there was some sort of problem when I tried to use Apple Pay for the transaction: I think it couldn’t recognize my face due to the position I was in, and the passcode failed as well. And when Apple Pay failed, it left the machine totally locked up. We couldn’t get it to respond to any of the buttons on the screen, or even reset. Poor error handling on the part of the implementation team, I believe.

Sadly, we had to chalk this up as a failed experiment. But I did get some taco-flavored Doritos while I was there. I haven’t seen those around in a while.

Posted in Food, Guns | 2 Comments »

Birthday musical interlude.

July 28th, 2025

Today, my blog is old enough to drive.

At least with a provisional driver’s license in the state of Texas.

It was a busy weekend. I’ll have some more updates later. But how about a musical interlude?

And speaking of Tennessee Ernie Williams, this sounds like one of the upper circles of Hell to me. But I can’t pass up the opportunity to quote the phrase used in the NYT headline, “Tennessee Williams on ice”.

At the Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Skating Rink, home of the North Berkshire Youth Hockey Black Bears, five talented skaters performed Will Davis’s “The Gig,” a diverting if impenetrable riff on a late Williams novel called “Moise and the World of Reason.” As the skaters swirled and swooshed in pretty patterns and garish costumes, never enacting the story literally but suggesting a circle of queer friends and lovers, the audience listened on headphones to selections from the novel while trying to stay warm.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

My blog is broken. Days 5 and 6.

July 25th, 2025

I contacted Bluehost last night to follow up on my ticket.

They claimed they emailed me a status update, which I never received. (Yes, I checked my junk and spam folders.)

They also claimed that I needed to delete some “malware infected” files. The specific ones they cited were:

/home4/sportsg3/public_html/500.php
/home4/sportsg3/public_html/sdclog/500.php

I looked at those files. They looked like standard HTML files displaying a “500 Internal Server Error”. I saw no evidence that they were infected in any way. But Bluehost support refused to proceed until I deleted those files and a “security scan” came back “clean”.

Now that I’ve done that, I’m waiting for an update from Bluehost support. Which I probably won’t get, as they keep claiming to send updates that I don’t get. (They are sending the updates to the admin address with Bluehost, which is also where the chat transcripts (that I am getting) go to.)

In the meantime, I talked to Siteground. They offer everything Bluehost does, and will even do a professional migration of all of my WordPress instances from Bluehost to their hosting. Even better, the first “professional migration” is free, and ones after that are reasonably priced. And their chat rep was pleasant and seemed knowledgeable. (Of course, I don’t know if they were sales or support.)

This may be the way I end up going.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 25, 2025.

July 25th, 2025

Hulk Hogan. THR. NYT. WWE. Legal Insurrection. McThag has a nice obit up which I can’t link to directly: search for “Another One”. IMDB.

Lawrence was trying to convince me yesterday that we should watch “Gremlins 2: The New Batch”. I countered with “Thunder In Paradise”, which appears to be available on DVD as three movies cut together from episodes of the TV show. (See also: “The Master“.)

Lawrence: That’s the one that’s “Airwolf, on a boat, except stupid”?

And “Suburban Commando” is, arguably, a genre film.

Chuck Mangione. THR.

Posted in Music, Obits, Sports | 2 Comments »

My blog is broken. Day 4.

July 23rd, 2025

It has been close to 24 hours since Bluehost “escalated” my case.

I still can’t upload photos, and Bluehost has made no attempt to contact me: I’ve checked my email, including the junk and spam folders.

That doesn’t mean, however, that someone hasn’t been working on my blog.

I discovered when I went to write today’s obit watch that Someone Who Isn’t Me (SWIM) had disabled all my plugins. Including the one that disables the WordPress block editor, and the spam filtering plugin. Which were the only two I had enabled. Yes, disabling plugins is a good diagnostic step, but once you’ve run the diagnostics, shouldn’t you put them back?

And I think I know why I can’t upload images, not even small ones, at least at the moment: someone set the “Maximum upload file size” to “0 B.” Yes, zero bytes. Additionally, there are about five images in my media library that weren’t there before, and are duplicates of images previously uploaded.

I’m going to give Bluehost another 24 hours to fix the problem before I ask for a status update. That’s 48 hours.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 23, 2025.

July 23rd, 2025

Ozzy Osbourne roundup: THR. NYT. ASM826 by way of Borepatch.

In honor of Mr. Osbourne and ASM826’s obit, please feel free to share your favorite “inappropriate public urination” story in the comments below. You can remain monogamous if you’d like: I’m certainly not going to out anybody.

The quartet released its debut album, also called “Black Sabbath,” in 1970, and followed with seven more over the next eight years. The band’s music was largely reviled by critics and snubbed by radio stations, but its albums were consistently certified platinum, and songs like “Paranoid,” “Iron Man” and “War Pigs” became anthems for generations of disaffected youth.

…

Mr. Osbourne had long drunk to excess, but as Black Sabbath became successful he could afford a wider variety of intoxicants, and he enthusiastically pursued all of them. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I Am Ozzy” (2009), “Over the past 40 years I’ve been loaded on booze, coke, acid, quaaludes, glue, cough mixture, heroin, Rohypnol, Klonopin, Vicodin, and too many other heavy-duty substances to list.” Throughout his career he frequently announced his sobriety, only to backslide into addiction.

Sarah Morlok Cotton. She was the last survivor of the Morlok quadruplets. And this is one of those sad stories from before my time. I think this is sort of before my mother’s time, even.

They were born in 1930.

Donations poured in almost immediately. The city of Lansing provided the family with a rent-free home. The Massachusetts Carriage Company sent a custom-made baby carriage with four seats. Businessmen opened bank accounts for each child.
“Lansing’s Morlok quadruplets,” The Associated Press wrote, “are the most famous group of babies on the American continent.”
The Morloks charged visitors 25 cents to visit their home and see the babies. Carl Morlok, who ran for constable of Lansing in 1931, used photos of his daughters on his campaign ads with the slogan, “We will appreciate your support.” He won in a landslide.

The Great Depression was ongoing, so their mom turned them into song and dance performers. All four girls were also abused by their father.

He banged the sisters’ heads together when they wouldn’t go to sleep. A germophobe, he forbade them from going to the library because he worried that there were germs on the books. Worst of all, Ms. Farley noted, he sexually abused all of the girls when they were teenagers.

When the girls were in their 20s, they began to show signs of mental illness.

Eventually, a doctor who had been treating the sisters in Michigan referred them to the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland. Intrigued by the connections between the genetic and environmental causes of mental illness, a team of researchers there studied the quadruplets from 1955 to 1958. Each woman had her own psychiatrist, though only Sarah was able to engage in meaningful psychotherapy.

…

Only Sarah recovered enough to live on her own. Ms. Farley attributed that to two factors: She had endured less abuse from her father than her sisters had, and she had benefited from exceptionally good psychotherapy during the study in Maryland.
“She knew quite clearly that she got better at NIMH and her sisters didn’t,” Ms. Farley said in an interview. “And she always had survivor’s guilt about that.”

…

Sarah met George Cotton, an Air Force officer, at Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, D.C. They married in 1961, and for many years she worked as a legal secretary and typist.
Mr. Cotton died in 2023. In addition to their son David, Mrs. Cotton is survived by four grandsons. Another son, William, died in 1994. As for the other Morlok sisters, Wilma died in 2002, Helen in 2003 and Edna in 2015.

Posted in Music, Obits, Urine | 2 Comments »

My blog is broken. Day 3.

July 22nd, 2025

File uploads still do not work. At least, not consistently, and not in a way that I can tolerate.

Sometimes (maybe 30% of the time) I can upload a file, and it appears to work. I can see the file in my media library. I can insert it into a post. But it’s a 50/50 crapshoot whether the file actually displays when I save a draft and preview. Most of the time, I get one of these entertaining error messages:

Screenshot

Screenshot

Screenshot

Yes, these work, but they are very small scren snapshot files. None is over 1 MB in size.

After another half-hour in chat with Bluehost support:

Screenshot

I have to give this support rep props, though: at least he acted on my escalation request the first time. The support rep on Sunday repeatedly refused to escalate.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 22, 2025.

July 22nd, 2025

Sgt. Jake Larson (United States Army – ret.). He was 102.

In January 1942, he was stationed in Northern Ireland as part of the Army V Corps, also known as the Victory Corps. It played critical roles in the D-Day invasion, the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge.
As an operations sergeant, Mr. Larson assembled the planning books for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy. He ran onto Omaha Beach while German machine gunners sprayed the beach with gunfire.
He told The New York Times in 2019 that he remembered jumping off his landing craft into frigid water up to his neck amid explosions. He hid behind a pile of sand and asked a soldier if he had any dry matches to light a cigarette, as his were all wet.
“I looked again and there was no head under the helmet,” Mr. Larson said. “I thank that guy today. In that instant I had the ability to get up and run.”
He said that he weighed 120 pounds at the time.
“I don’t think the Germans were capable of shooting a toothpick, so I made it to shore,” he said. His unit, though, suffered significant losses.

During the pandemic, his grand daughter set up a TikTok account for him.

Mr. Larson had 1.2 million followers on TikTok on his channel, “Story Time with Papa Jake.” He amassed more than 11 million likes on the page.

…

The first video was posted in June 2020, and about 225 more followed as he quickly gained hundreds of thousands of followers.
Initially, he recounted in detail the preparations for D-Day, the operation itself, and the aftermath. But soon he added a recurring feature in which he opened letters and packages from his followers, and shared their contents in videos.

…

Mr. Larson was the last surviving member of his company.
“I am the last man,” he told The Times, while wearing a pin on his hat with the shield and motto of his military regiment, “To the last man.”

The Luckiest Man in the World: Stories from the life of Papa Jake on Amazon.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner. NYT (archived). IMDB. This is being well covered everywhere, and I have nothing to add. Except maybe: be careful swimming.

Jimmy Hunt, actor. Interesting story: he retired from acting at 14, and died at 85. IMDB.

Edwin Feulner, Heritage Foundation guy.

Tom Troupe, actor. Other credits include “Planet of the Apes” (the TV series), “The F.B.I.”, “Kelly’s Heroes”…

…and “Mannix”. (“A Question of Midnight“, season 3, episode 5. He was “Ben Holland”.)

Eileen Fulton, actress. Other credits include “Nero Wolfe” (the 1959 series), “Naked City”, and “Our Private World”.

Posted in 1970s, Heroism, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

My blog is broken. Day 2.

July 21st, 2025

I still can’t upload files.

Bluehost support claimed yesterday, after 2 1/2 hours on the phone, that they had fixed the problem. It worked for a very short time today, but it has gone back to the same errors I was seeing yesterday.

The workaround that they provided also failed with a cryptic “AJAX” error when I tried using it.

Posted in Admin | 2 Comments »

My blog is broken.

July 20th, 2025

And Bluehost is as useless as teats on a boar hog, as we like to say here in Texas.

Edited to add: according to Bluehost, they have no way to transfer calls internally.

Edited to add 2: I am super, super unhappy with Bluehost and their support right now. As much of a pain as it is likely to be, I am giving serious and urgent thought to exporting everything and finding new hosting.

Edited to add 3: Among other responses from support, they can’t update my PHP instance because “my content is outdated”. (Do they mean my WordPress version? It’s at 6.8.2. Which I resent because they forced this upgrade on me. I had been avoiding upgrades, even though it is a security issue, because I didn’t want to use the farking WordPress block editor, which I hate with the fire of a thousand suns. So when they forced the upgrade on me, first thing I did was install a plugin to disable the block editor.)

Edited to add 4: the specific problem is that I can’t upload normal JPEG files, the largest of which is about 5.4 MB. WordPress just hangs during the upload process, or returns an error saying the server can’t handle a file of that size. Hasn’t been a problem in the past. Two and half hours in chat with a Bluehost support person, and no resolution. Their attitude is that for “large” files, I should:

  • Log into my control panel.
  • Upload the files using the “file manager”.
  • Go back to WordPress.
  • Manually sync my media library with the files I just uploaded.

Instead of, you know, pressing the “add media” button in WordPress, selecting the file I want to upload, and letting WordPress do the work.

Screenshot

This, on the other hand, uploaded just fine.

Posted in Admin, Rage | 2 Comments »

Bagatelle (#138)

July 19th, 2025

“Justified” is full of timeless wisdom about how one should lead their life.

One of the best examples of this is Raylan’s Rule:

Raylan Givens: Any problem, that’s someone else’s fault. You ever hear of the saying, “You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole”?

Another good example of this:

Art Mullen: I got a call this morning from AUSA David Vasquez. Wants to talk to you about you shooting Boyd Crowder.
Raylan Givens: What’s there to talk about? He pulled first. There was a witness.
Art Mullen: But you see, ten days ago you shot a man in Miami. Put it like this: you were in the first grade; bit a kid every week? They’d start to think of you as a biter.

“They’d start to think of you as a biter.” What brings this to mind?

A summer associate at white-shoe firm Sidley Austin began biting colleagues and roaring at them on her first day — and by the time she was canned, her body count had reached double digits, insiders told the legal news site Above the Law.
The bites were not “in an aggressive, ‘we’re beefing’ way” – but rather, “a faux-quirky manic pixie dream girl crossed with the Donner party vibe,” the outlet reported.
“Though I’ve seen pics of the results post-Biglaw Biter, and ‘nibble’ is probably too tame a word,” the article’s author noted.

…

A jaw-dropping account of the chomping spree posted to X said the girl sank her teeth into 10 colleagues, including other summer interns, associate lawyers and even an HR rep at the firm’s Seventh Avenue offices.

…

The firm declined to comment. But an insider told The Post the intern bit only five employees and that exaggerations were now flooding the internet.

Posted in Bagatelle, Law, TV | 2 Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#149 in a series)

July 18th, 2025

In April of last year, the Detroit Lakes (Minnesota) Police Department responded to a report of a break-in. When they responded, they found a woman in the basement of a home, “dressed in black and carrying a flashlight covered with a sock”.

The woman was State Senator Nicole Mitchell. The home was her stepmother’s.

On Friday, a jury in northern Minnesota convicted Ms. Mitchell of burglary and possession of burglary or theft tools, felonies that can carry prison sentences.

Ms. Mitchell told the police…

…she had entered the house to collect sentimental items, including one of her late father’s flannel shirts. “I have never done anything like this,” she said during the arrest, body camera footage showed.

…

After the arrest, Ms. Mitchell issued a statement denying that she had stolen anything. She said then that she entered the house to check on a family member suffering from “Alzheimer’s and associated paranoia.” During the trial, she and her lawyers insisted she was acting out of concern for her ailing relative.

…

On the witness stand this week, the stepmother described being awakened by someone in her home and calling the police. She acknowledged having Alzheimer’s and at times gave testimony that seemed to contradict body camera footage.
Ms. Mitchell testified in her own defense for several hours on Thursday. She said she had not been at the house to get her father’s belongings, as she initially told police officers, but instead to check on her stepmother’s well-being.

I’m actually slightly sympathetic to Ms. Mitchell and her problems caring for an aging relative with Alzheimer’s. But it sounds like she told one story to the responding officers (who were wearing body cameras) and a different story at trial. That never looks good to the jury. And she could have called the police for a welfare check, too, if she was concerned.

The burglary charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison upon conviction, and the burglary tools charge carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison.

There’s a lot of discussion in the NYT coverage of what this means for Al Franken the Minnesota senate. The Democratic party (to which Ms. Mitchell belongs, and this is actually noted in the second paragrpah) holds a one-seat majority in the Senate.

Already this year, special elections have been held to replace a Democratic senator who died and a Republican senator who resigned after being accused of arranging to meet with an underage prostitute. Another special election filled a House seat after a judge determined that the Democrat who won the regular election did not meet residency requirements. Then last month, State Representative Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, was assassinated and State Senator John A. Hoffman, a Democrat, was shot and wounded in what the authorities described as targeted political violence.
If Ms. Mitchell leaves office, the Senate would be evenly divided until Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, calls a special election for voters to choose a replacement, which could happen before lawmakers return to the Capitol in 2026.

More coverage from the Star-Tribune:

[Becker County Attorney Brian] McDonald said she never placed a welfare call. Instead she drove 220 miles in the middle of the night, dressed in all black and packed flashlights, latex gloves and a small pry crowbar device used to break into the basement window.
“Who packs a freaking prybar just in case?” McDonald said to the jury.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Today in fraud.

July 18th, 2025

Well, technically, Wednesday in fraud, but let us not quibble.

Brett Lemieux killed himself on Wednesday. He was 45.

Mr. Lemieux founded “MisterManCave”, a sports memorabilia site. I believe this is the site.

Before he killed himself, he made a post to Facebook claiming he’d sold “more than four million counterfeit items and surpassed $350 million in sales”. The Facebook account is down now, but the NYPost has an image of the post.

Lemieux was able to pull off the alleged large-scale counterfeit scheme by faking holograms, authentication stickers for sports collectibles, of some of the most prominent companies in sports memorabilia: Panini, Fanatics, Tri-Star, James Spence Authentics, Mill Creek Sports and GT Marketing, among others.
Lemieux would use the fake holograms to sell counterfeit memorabilia at a far lower price than the market, and he profited handsomely from that tactic.
In the Facebook post, Lemieux said he released 80,000 pieces of memorabilia into the market when Kobe Bryant died in 2020.

I care even less about sports memorabilia than I do about sports, but I am a connoisseur of fraud. And this is big fraud. I actually think this story is being underplayed right now: if Mr. Lemieux put four million counterfeit items out there on the memorabilia market with forged holograms, I think this is going to have a massive impact on the market.

“People have known about this guy. They’ve known his work. They know what he’s been up to,” well-known sports memorabilia expert Steve Grad told WRTV Indianapolis
“He has been at it for years and years. And he’s driven down the price of things. You know, you look at a Tom Brady autograph and Tom Brady’s value is affected drastically by this individual.”

But has anybody asked Ja Morant Guy for his opinion?

(“Ja Morant signed basketballs” on MisterManCave.)

Sightly more seriously, FotB RoadRich and I have been discussing the rules for crooks. It looks like Mr. Lemieux followed Rule 1: if you’re going to steal, steal big.

But it doesn’t look like he figured out Rule 2: have an exit plan. Steal enough money so you can live out the rest of your life comfortably in a country with no extradition treaty with the United States.

On a somewhat related to fraud note: Lloyd Howell resigned as executive director of the NFL Players Association on Thursday.

Howell’s tenure had come under scrutiny after several recent reports from ESPN and the “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast.
In May, ESPN reported that the FBI was investigating the financial dealings of the NFLPA and the MLB Players Association related to a multibillion-dollar group-licensing firm, OneTeam Partners. According to sources, the report triggered the NFLPA to hire Ronald C. Machen of law firm Wilmer Hale to review Howell’s activities as executive director. The FBI investigation, which is being conducted in conjunction with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn, New York, is continuing, sources said.

Even better, Mr. Howell’s expenses are being examined. In particular…the strippers. Always with the strippers.

…Howell charged the union for two visits to strip clubs, including a $738.82 car service that took him from the airport to one of the clubs.

…

One receipt, obtained by ESPN, shows Howell was picked up in a sedan by a car service at Fort Lauderdale International Airport on Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023, at 10:26 p.m. The car’s first stop was at a nearby Miami Gardens address. The receipt shows only one other stop, nearly eight hours later.
At 6 a.m., the car dropped off Howell at his luxury condominium in Sunny Isles Beach, the receipt shows.
Later, a union finance worker noticed the car service’s exorbitant cost. The employee searched online for the Miami Gardens address, discovering it was Tootsie’s Cabaret.
The 76,000-square-foot venue bills itself as the world’s largest strip club — “full nude No. 1 rated.”

…

During this year’s NFLPA summit on Feb. 21, Howell accompanied the employees to the Magic City strip club for an outing that incurred $2,426 in charges including cash withdrawals, ranging from $200 to $525, from a club ATM, sources and documents show. They used two “VIP rooms.”
According to the expense report, the purpose of the strip club outing: “Player Engagement Event to support & grow our Union.”

…

The employee noted on a March 23 expense report: “$736 = This was the final amount I was charged to close the tab for both secluded sections for our Player Members. This included Food, Alcoholic Drinks, fees, taxes, and gratuity.” No players’ names are listed on receipts or the reports.

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Obit watch: July 18, 2025.

July 18th, 2025

NYT (archived) and ESPN obits for Felix Baumgartner.

Alan Bergman. He and his wife, Marilyn (who passed away in 2022) were a formidable team of lyricists.

The Bergmans regularly collaborated with prominent composers like Marvin Hamlisch, with whom they wrote “The Way We Were,” from the 1973 Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford romance of the same name, and Michel Legrand, with whom they wrote “The Windmills of Your Mind,” from the 1968 crime movie “The Thomas Crown Affair,” starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. They also wrote the lyrics to Mr. Legrand’s score for Ms. Streisand’s 1983 film “Yentl,” for which they won their third Academy Award.
The Bergmans were among the favored lyricists of stars like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and especially Ms. Streisand, who in 2011 released the album “What Matters Most: Barbra Streisand Sings the Lyrics of Alan and Marilyn Bergman.” The album’s 10 tracks included “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “Nice ’n’ Easy,” “That Face” and the title song, none of which were among the numerous Bergman lyrics Ms. Streisand had recorded before. Promoting the album, she described the Bergmans as having “a remarkable gift for expressing affairs of the heart.”
Between 1970 and 1996, the Bergmans received a total of 16 Oscar nominations. One year, 1983, they claimed three of the five best-song nominations, for “It Might Be You” from “Tootsie,” “If We Were in Love” from “Yes, Giorgio” and “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” from “Best Friends.” (They lost to “Up Where We Belong” from “An Officer and a Gentleman.”)

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Bagatelle (#137)

July 18th, 2025

I’m sorry, folks. I have to do this, for Borepatch’s sake.

Shot:

Security researchers recently revealed that the personal information of millions of people who applied for jobs at McDonald’s was exposed after they guessed the password (“123456”) for the fast food chain’s account at Paradox.ai, a company that makes artificial intelligence based hiring chatbots used by many Fortune 500 firms.

Chaser:

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What is this I still don’t even have any words again.

July 17th, 2025

Missed this yesterday.

The Fyre Festival “brand and its intellectual property rights” sold on Ebay.

For $245,000.

What’s Included in the Sale:

✅ Brand Name
✅ Registered Trademarks & Intellectual Property
✅ Official Social Media Accounts (including verified Instagram)
✅ Comprehensive Marketing Assets (photos, videos, graphic templates, ad archives)
✅ FYRE Festival Domains
✅ Caribbean Festival Location Option (with full support from elected island leadership)
✅ Behind-the-Scenes Content & Documentary Footage
✅ Email & SMS Lists
✅ Artist & Talent Relationships
✅ Extensive Media Coverage Archive
✅ Access to Core Team (optional)

…

(Not eligible for eBay purchase protection programs)

Here’s the listing. I tried to archive it, but it didn’t come out properly.

…simply own one of the most infamous cultural IPs in the world…

I have a pretty low opinion of Billy McFarland and the Fyre Festival brand, but props to whoever wrote the listing for using “infamous” correctly. That’s such a rare thing these days, I feel like it needs to be called out when it happens.

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What is this I don’t even have any words.

July 17th, 2025

A New York City police officer who previously worked for Wells Fargo was charged on Thursday with spending $87,000 in bank customers’ money on personal bills that included BMW payments and a gluteus-building program called Booty by Jacks.

The Booty by Jacks website.

The complaint does not indicate whether the subscription for Booty by Jacks, described on its website as “the world’s best glute-building program,” was for Officer Rodriguez Acosta. The Booty by Jacks Instagram account, which has more than 730,000 followers, says: “We Help Women Lose Fat, Build Muscle & Look Incredible in a Bikini.”
Subscriptions range from $33 a week for workout training alone to $47 a week or $127 a month for programs that combine fitness and nutritional guidance and other services. The website shows what are presented as several sets of before-and-after photos of swimsuit-clad female customers. There are also versions of the programs for men.

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Obit watch: July 17, 2025.

July 17th, 2025

Connie Francis. NYT.

She made her stage debut at 4, singing “Anchors Aweigh” and accompanying herself on the accordion at Olympic Park in Irvington, N.J.
At 11, she was a regular on “Marie Moser’s Starlets,” a local television variety show. After she appeared on Ted Mack’s “Original Amateur Hour” and “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” Mr. Mack advised her to lose the accordion, and Mr. Godfrey advised her to change her last name to Francis.

…

“I often say, I’d like to be remembered not for the highs I’ve reached but for the depths from which I’ve risen,” she told Mr. James. “There were exhilarating highs and abysmal lows. But it was fighting to get out of those lows that I feel most proud of.”

Joanna Bacon, British actress. Other credits include “The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells”, “The Bill”, and “EastEnders”.

Bryan Braman, former NFL linebacker. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Braman was part of the first playoff team in Texans history after signing with Houston as an undrafted free agent out of West Texas A&M. He was a regular on Houston’s special teams, with his most memorable moment coming in a helmet-less tackle of a Tennessee Titans kick returner in the 2011 regular-season finale. Braman was also a 2012 Pro Bowl alternate with Houston, and he finished his career with four years with the Philadelphia Eagles.

This is just in, and should be considered breaking news: Felix Baumgartner, noted skydiver and daredevil.

In 1999, he set the world record for the highest parachute jump from a building when he took a leap from the 1,483-foot Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
That same year, he set a record for the lowest BASE jump ever, hurtling himself from the 85-foot arm of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro.
Then in 2003, Baumgartner became the first person to skydive across the English Channel with the help of a custom-designed carbon fiber wing, leaping from the craft at a height of more than six miles over Dover, England before landing safely in Cap Blanc-Nez in France.
His most famous jump was in 2012, when Baumgartner jumped 24 miles from a helium balloon, reaching a top speed of Mach 1.25 (843.6 mph) and becoming the first person to ever break the sound barrier without a vehicle.
He descended from the stratosphere in full free-fall for four minutes and 19 seconds before deploying his parachute.

This broke Joe Kittinger’s old record. (Col. Kittinger assisted with planning the jump.)

The 56-year-old Austrian extreme sports enthusiast reportedly fell ill while flying a motorized paraglider in the Italian coastal town of Porto Sant’Elpidio, crashing the craft into a hotel swimming pool.
He reportedly died instantly during the freak accident, according to media reports. A hotel employee was also injured after being struck by the glider and taken to the hospital with neck injuries.

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Obit watch: July 16, 2025.

July 16th, 2025

NYT obit for Martin Cruz Smith.

Mr. Smith’s initial evocation of Russia was all the more remarkable in that he had spent exactly two weeks in the Soviet Union, as a tourist, in 1973 and did not speak Russian. But he made up for it by frequenting libraries in the United States and talking to Soviet émigrés, who filled in the gaps in his knowledge. “A number of the Russians who helped me would in fact come and live with me and my family,” Mr. Smith told the reference guide Contemporary Authors in 1986.
With the character of Renko, he was also making moral and historical claims, ambitions he sometimes admitted to in interviews.
“He’s the truth-teller, the honest man in a dishonest system,” Mr. Smith said in an interview with CBS in 2009. At the same time, he discounted American fears of the Soviet Union. “It was an illusion that it was a threat to Americans,” he said. “The system was far more dangerous to its own people.”

Fauja Singh, runner. His age is unknown.

Mr. Singh gave his birth date as April 1, 1911, and said he was born in Beas Pind. The country was ruled by Britain at the time, and birth certificates were not regularly issued in villages. His parents were farmers.

…

On Oct. 13 [2011 – DB], at a meet in Toronto, he set eight world records for the 95-plus age group in events ranging from 100 meters to 5,000 meters, or 3.1 miles. Doug Smith, the co-chair of Ontario Masters Athletics, called it the “most astonishing achievement” he had ever witnessed.
“He rested between the events by sitting down and having a few sips of tea,” Mr. Smith said in an interview for this obituary in 2017. “He was actually running — both feet off the ground. He was amazing.”
Three days after the track meet, Mr. Singh performed yet another rousing feat. He became the first reputed centenarian to complete a race of 26.2 miles by finishing the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in 8 hours 25 minutes 16 seconds. His actual running time was 8:11:05, but in the throng of runners, it took him 14 minutes to reach the start.

…

Dr. Thomas Perls, director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University, said in an interview in 2016 that it was possible that a centenarian could run 26.2 miles. Stressing that he had not examined Mr. Singh, Dr. Perls said: “I’m not saying he’s that age. All I’m saying is it’s conceivable to see a 100-year-old running a marathon.”

…

He was hit by a car while on his daily walk in his home village of Beas Pind in the Punjab region of India and died in a hospital, his former coach, Harmander Singh (no relation), said in a phone interview from London. He had returned to India to live during the pandemic.

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Brief historical note, suitable for use in schools.

July 15th, 2025

By way of Task and Purpose:

“There Are Many Like It: 250 Years of Marine Corps Service Rifles”.

Yes, there are photos.

The journey from the muskets of the American Revolution to the rifles of the modern era illustrates a continuous evolution in the weapons carried by the United States Marine Corps. Driven by technological advancements and the ever-changing demands of the battlefield, these firearms have undergone significant transformations, keeping stride with the ever-changing nature of war. Yet, as Bernstein aptly points out, just as the character of war remains the same, so does the Corps’ unwavering dedication to precision marksmanship. This ethos, ingrained since the earliest days of the Corps, ensures that regardless of the technological sophistication of the weapon, every Marine remains, at their core, a highly skilled and effective war fighter. At the heart of this is the rifle.

Posted in Bagatelle, Guns, History | Comments Closed

Your loser update: July 15, 2025.

July 15th, 2025

The All-Star game is tonight, so it seems like a good time for another loser update.

As discussed previously, it seems like there are two teams worth focusing on:

The Chicago White Sox are 32-65, for a .330 winning percentage. That projects out to about 108 projected losses, if my math is right.

The Colorado Rockies are 22-74, for a .229 winning percentage. My projections say that works out to nearly 125 losses. That’s in “historically bad” territory. (Remember, the record is 121 losses, set by the White Sox last year.)

Posted in Loser, Sports | 1 Comment »

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