Obit watch: February 25, 2025.

February 25th, 2025

Clint Hill.

You may not recognize the name, but I think you’ll recognize him from the photos.

He was the Secret Service agent who jumped on the back of the limo when JFK was shot, and kept Mrs. Kennedy from falling out.

Thirteen days after the assassination, in a ceremony attended by Mrs. Kennedy, Mr. Hill received the highest award bestowed by the Treasury Department — the agency that oversaw the Secret Service at the time — for his “extraordinary courage and heroic effort in the face of maximum danger.”

…

When he retired from the Secret Service in 1975, he was the assistant director responsible for all protective forces.
In December 2013, the Secret Service honored him at its James J. Rowley Training Center in Maryland, erecting a bronze plaque next to a street it named Clint Hill Way.
But the accolades and his ascendancy in the agency could not overcome Mr. Hill’s feelings of guilt. He blamed himself for not reacting a split second faster to the sound of gunfire, becoming convinced that he had missed a chance to save President Kennedy’s life. His emotional turmoil resulted in his retirement in 1975 at age 43, at the urging of doctors.

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits | 3 Comments »

Bagatelle (#128).

February 24th, 2025

I shared this with Lawrence on Saturday, and he was amused (in the “WTF?!” sense):

“Georgia man sentenced to 20 years for bombing woman’s home, planting python to eat her daughter”.

In case you were wondering: 20 years. Federal time, so there’s no parole.

(Also on the “WTF?!” front, a very quick review of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”: pretentious navel-gazing crap.)

Posted in Bagatelle, Explosives, Law, Movies, Reptiles, Snakes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 24, 2025.

February 24th, 2025

Joy Reid’s show on MSNBC.

MSNBC’s president suggested Sunday that blindsided staffers of liberal host Joy Reid’s canceled show can apply for other jobs within the progressive network as she confirmed the group of employees would be canned, according to a report.

Just gonna slide in here before Lawrence does…

Lynne Marie Stewart. Other credits include the animated 1995 “The Tick”, “The Running Man”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Son of the Beach”.

Roberta Flack.

“I’ve been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson,” Ms. Flack told The New York Times in 1970. “If everybody said I sounded like one person, I’d worry. But when they say I sound like them all, I know I’ve got my own style.”

Tom Fitzmorris, who was the food guy in New Orleans for many years.

Mr. Fitzmorris had a corny sense of humor, which often involved jokes about the phrase “soup du jour.” (A customer asks what the soup du jour is; the waitress says, “I don’t know. They change it on me every day.”) He also liked to play elaborate April Fool’s pranks. He once made up a new restaurant that he said was opening near Commander’s Palace and described the fictitious competitor with such detailed admiration that Ella Brennan, then an owner of Commander’s Palace, dispatched her daughter, Ti Martin, to investigate.
Ti Martin, now one of the restaurant’s proprietors, remembered him as a particularly harsh critic, not out of meanness but because he wanted things done in a way he perceived as proper. When she ran out of iced tea at a restaurant she had just opened, he went on about it on his show for what she said seemed like an hour.
“But he was right,” she said. “Who runs out of iced tea?”

Posted in Food, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Gun books, not so much gun books, and other tales of recent library additions.

February 21st, 2025

If I make a small push here, I can get the last of the gun books out of the living room. That will leave me with one on the kitchen table (which is there waiting for me to do the combination gun crankery/gun book post) and a few new additions upstairs. (Plus the backlog. We don’t talk about the backlog.)

Some of these books I can cover relatively quickly, so maybe it is worth making that push. All of them are interesting to me, but for varying reasons.

Shall we get on with it?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books, Food, Hoplobibilophilia | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#143 in a series)

February 20th, 2025

There was an interesting report in yesterday’s NYT. Because I want to be more than a Times digest service, I’ve tried to add additional context from the local news.

Hanceville is a city in Cullman County, Alabama. The 2020 census population was 3,217, and the town employs eight police officers.

Five of the police officers, including the chief, were indicted by a grand jury on Wednesday. The grand jury also recommended the complete abolition of the police department, and stated the department is “a threat to public safety”.

So what’s the backstory? It seems that, either due to malice or incompetence, the police department has trouble securing and accounting for evidence.

“One of the most concerning things that we discovered in this process was that Hanceville Police Department’s evidence room was not secure,” said [Cullman DA Champ] Crocker. “Criminal evidence must be secured in order to have that evidence for prosecution and to ensure due process. This evidence room was anything but secure.”
During the news conference, Crocker showed a photo of the evidence room, pointing out a hole in the door and a broom against the wall.
“This is someone who works there, and you can see this individual has this stick in his hand and is pushing it in the door, in the hole to jimmy open the door, and the grand jury watched a lot of videos, this is from security camera footage, showing this evidence room was routinely accessed by individuals who were not authorized to do so, going in and out using the stick through the hole in the wall,” explained Crocker.

One of the people who accessed the evidence room was a 911 dispatcher. He was found dead in his office the same day. “Evidence” was found in his office, and the autopsy showed he overdosed on “fentanyl and other drugs”.

The chief is charged with “two counts of failure to report ethics crime and tampering with evidence.” The other officers are charged with:

* “two counts of computer tampering, two counts of using office for personal gain, tampering with evidence, and two counts of solicitation to commit a controlled substance crime.”
* “two counts of computer tampering, two counts of using office for personal gain, tampering with evidence, and two counts of solicitation to commit a controlled substance crime.”
* “tampering with evidence.”
* “four counts of unlawful distribution of controlled substance and two counts conspiracy to unlawfully distribute a controlled substance.” That officer’s wife (who is not employed by the department) is also charged with “two counts of unlawful distribution of a controlled substance and two counts conspiracy to unlawfully distribute a controlled substance.”

It sounds like the officer and his wife had a thing going where they were supplying anabolic steroids to two of the other indicted officers. One of the officers used his department issued cell phone to get steroids from those two, and went to the hospital while on duty to get steroid shots from Mrs. Indicted Officer. He also allegedly misused law enforcement databases to get information on two “Does”. Another one of the officers illegally accessed law enforcement databases to get information on a murder investigation, and also got steroid shots from Mrs. Indicted Officer while on duty.

NYT coverage (by way of archive.is).

Coverage from AL.com.

Posted in Cops, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Audit time!

February 19th, 2025

There’s an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which is what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce stories about the same idea. It’s called steam-engine time because nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to do it.

Audit time is like steam engine time, except more boring to watch from the outside, and more interesting from the inside. Especially when you get what the late Neptunus Lex referred to as “short but exciting” conversations.

Getting around to the point, though, two smart people have written smart things about audits and auditing.

LawDog:

While most people think of “audit” in the financial sense, there are actually about nine different kinds of audit — at least — most of which don’t need the services of an accountant.

Larry Correia:

You do NOT need to be an accountant to be an auditor. Anybody who says this is a total dumb ass with zero grasp of how any of this shit works in real life. The people who make up your audit team are recruited from whatever skill sets are necessary to audit that particular system. I (the accountant) have been on audit teams with IT guys, programmers, lawyers, and even machinists. (why machinists, because I was auditing a factory, and I could count the parts, but I couldn’t tell you if the parts were bullshit or not)

I commend both of these gentlemen to your attention, while I work on pulling together some other things and try to stay warm.

Posted in Clippings | Comments Closed

Short art, damn it! Art! watch.

February 18th, 2025

This is not something I regularly get a chance to cover, especially since 2020. So when it comes up, I can’t help but make note of it.

“‘The Gates’ was a huge art sensation 20 years ago — and it wasn’t the only vision Christo and Jeanne-Claude had for NYC”.

The NYPost article includes concept art for some of their other proposed, but never completed, projects for NYC.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude had an obsession with oil barrels. “They were so easy to stack and you could paint them all these different colors,” said Yavachev. “You could use them almost like pixels.”

Posted in Art, Bagatelle, Christo | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 17, 2025.

February 17th, 2025

Eleanor Maguire passed away in early January. She was 54. Cancer got her.

I think this is a fascinating obit. She was a cognitive neuroscientist who did a lot of early and influential work using MRI scanning to study the brain, especially the hippocampus.

Her studies revealed that the hippocampus can grow, and that memory is not a replay of the past but rather an active reconstructive process that shapes how people imagine the future.
“She was absolutely one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world on memory,” Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London, said in an interview. “She changed our understanding of memory, and I think she also gave us important new ways of studying it.”

She was watching TV one night and came across “The Knowledge“, about London taxi drivers and their qualifying exams. (That’s a rabbit hole worth going down if you’re unfamiliar with it.)

In the first of a series of studies, Dr. Maguire and her colleagues scanned the brains of taxi drivers while quizzing them about the shortest routes between various destinations in London.
The results, published in 1997, showed that blood flow in the right hippocampus increased sharply as the drivers described their routes — meaning that specific area of the brain played a key role in spatial navigation.
But that didn’t solve the mystery of why the taxi drivers were so good at their jobs.
Dr. Maguire kept digging. Using M.R.I. machines, she measured different regions in the brains of 16 drivers, comparing their dimensions with those in the brains of people who weren’t taxi drivers.
“The posterior hippocampi of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control subjects,” she wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the size, she found, correlated with the length of a cabby’s career: The longer the cabby had driven, the bigger the hippocampus.

…

She followed up with other studies. One showed that the hippocampi of bus drivers — whose routes were set rather than navigated from memory — didn’t grow. Another showed that prospective taxi drivers who failed their tests did not gain any hippocampus volume in the process.
The implications were striking: The key structure in the brain governing memory and spatial navigation was malleable.
In a roundabout way, Dr. Maguire’s findings revealed the scientific underpinnings of the ancient Roman “method of loci,” a memorization trick also known as the “memory palace.”
This technique involves visualizing a large house and assigning an individual memory to a particular room. Mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, eliciting the memorized information. Dr. Maguire studied memory athletes — people who train their brains to memorize vast amounts of information quickly — who used this method, and observed that its effectiveness was “reflected in its continued use over two and a half millennia in virtually unchanged form.”

…

In studying patients with damage to the hippocampus, including those with amnesia, Dr. Maguire found that they couldn’t visualize or navigate future scenarios. One taxi driver, for instance, struggled to make his way through busy London streets in a virtual-reality simulation. Other amnesiacs couldn’t imagine an upcoming Christmas party or a trip to the beach.
“Instead of visualizing a single scene in their mind, such as a crowded beach filled with sunbathers, the patients reported seeing just a collection of disjointed images, such as sand, water, people and beach towels,” the journal Science News reported in 2009.
The hippocampus, it turns out, binds snippets of information to construct scenes from the past — and the future.

(See also.)

Jim Guy Tucker, former governor of Arkansas. You may remember him from such hits as Whitewater.

He had been among the most promising figures in Arkansas politics and a rival to Mr. Clinton in Arkansas’s Democratic Party. But he was forced to resign as governor in July 1996, after serving less than two years of his term.
Two months earlier, he had been convicted in a federal court in Little Rock. He had been prosecuted by independent counsel, a team led by Kenneth W. Starr, for receiving a fraudulent loan from a small business development company, Capital Management Services, in the mid-1980s.
In August 1996, Judge George Howard Jr. of Federal District Court in Little Rock sentenced him to four years’ probation — Mr. Tucker avoided jail because of testimony about a serious health condition — and ordered him to pay $294,000 in restitution to the Small Business Administration. By then Mr. Tucker had already quit the governor’s mansion; he would never hold office again.

…

The loan — for $150,000, according to the historian Jeannie M. Whayne of the University of Arkansas — should never have gone to Mr. Tucker’s water and sewer services company. Other sources say nearly $3 million was lent to Mr. Tucker and his co-defendants, James B. and Susan McDougal, who were also convicted in May 1996.
Capital Management Services “was supposed to make loans to companies where at least half the owners were ‘disadvantaged’ in some way,” the veteran Arkansas journalist Ernie Dumas, described as the dean of the Arkansas political press corps by the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, wrote in an unpublished manuscript.
But David Hale, the banker who ran Capital Management Services and was the key witness for Mr. Starr’s prosecution team, “never told any of his borrowers that, and few, if any, of them would have qualified,” Mr. Dumas wrote. “Tucker and the McDougals learned of the special designation, for disadvantaged people, at the trial.”

…

At the end of 1996 he received a liver transplant, which he credited with saving his life. Two years later, Mr. Starr was after him again, and Mr. Tucker pleaded guilty to tax fraud “to avoid going to prison,” Mr. Dumas wrote.
“The Justice Department and the I.R.S. eventually acknowledged that Starr had charged Tucker with violating a section of the federal bankruptcy code that did not even exist at the time of a cable-television transaction in the 1980s,” Mr. Dumas added. “The government eventually concluded that it might owe Tucker money but could not discern how much. It sent him and his wife a check for $1.44, which he framed and put on his wall.”

Ron Travisano, noted advertising guy.

FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Kevin Lacey, “pilot, philanthropist, businessman and Discovery Channel character”. He was part of the cast of “Airplane Repo”.

Rich met him a few times at fly-ins (and sent over a photo, which I don’t have his permission to reproduce here), and says he was a really down-to-earth guy with a lot of stories. As Rich put it, he was the kind of person you could just walk up and talk to.

Facebook.

Posted in Law, Neuroscience, Obits, Planes, Politics, TV | 2 Comments »

Back on the gun book train…

February 13th, 2025

…with one oddity that’s not really a gun book.

This was bought in one lot from Callahan and Company, so there was $8 shipping on top of these prices.

The jump goes here…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books, Hoplobibilophilia, Mammals | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 10, 2025.

February 10th, 2025

Tom “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” Robbins.

Alongside works by Carlos Castaneda, Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins paperbacks, dog-eared and torn, were common sights on the bookshelves and bedside milk crates of the late hippie era, between the tail end of the Vietnam War and the rise of Ronald Reagan’s America. He became one of the rare writers to achieve both a cult following and mega-best-seller status.

Noted for the W&L alums in the audience:

As a teenager he told his parents he wanted to be a novelist. His father, hoping to push his son toward a more practical career, persuaded him to enroll at Washington and Lee University, a Virginia school known for its journalism program. As a sports reporter for the campus newspaper, he was edited by Tom Wolfe.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#142 in a series)

February 7th, 2025

Information about this one has been hard to find. Mike the Musicologist sent me a press release from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the stories I turned up in Internet searches seem to be lightly rewritten from that.

Pearson, Georgia is a small town, with a population of 1,821 per the 2020 census. Robert “Buster” Johnson is the mayor.

“Buster” was busted yesterday.

I’m just going to quote the list of charges here:

  • Criminal Attempt to Commit Hindering or Apprehension or Punishment of Criminal
  • 3 counts of Influencing Witnesses
  • Criminal Solicitation to Commit False Statements and Writings
  • Criminal Solicitation to Commit False Official Certificates or Writings by Officers or Employees of a State and Political Subdivision
  • 2 counts of False Statements and Writings
  • Criminal Attempt to Commit Theft by Taking
  • Conspiracy in Restraint of Free and Open Competition
  • 4 counts of Conspiracy to Defraud State and Political Subdivision
  • Theft by Deception
  • 3 counts of Bribery
  • 2 counts of Theft by Taking
  • Fraud, Forgery, and Theft in Connection with Registration of Title to Land
  • Filing False Documents
  • 4 counts of Violation of Oath of Office by Public Officer

Go big or go home, you know? Also, “Violation of Oath of Office by Public Officer”? Didn’t know that was a crime in Georgia, or anywhere else, but I fully support the existence of this as a criminal charge.

Any public officer who willfully and intentionally violates the terms of his oath as prescribed by law shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than five years.

So what the heck happened? As I said previously, details are hard to come by, but the GBI press release says:

The investigation began when the Alapaha Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office received complaints of Mayor Johnson participating in fraudulent activities. The District Attorney subsequently requested the GBI to look into these allegations. During the investigation, agents uncovered a scheme to have an incarcerated person released from jail through fraudulent documentation, obtaining kickbacks from city contracts, theft of municipal land, and bribery of city employees.

Here’s a story from WALB, which doesn’t add much, except that some folks don’t like Buster.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Bagatelle (#126).

February 7th, 2025

I don’t know how many of my readers are familiar with the story of “The Man Who Rode The Thunder”, Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin.

I know Lawrence is, because we’ve talked about it before. FotB RoadRich may know the story as well.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, here’s a good brief overview from Dr. Dabbs. Elevator pitch: LTC Rankin was forced to bail out of his F-8 Crusader…into a thunderstorm.

I have a paperback copy of The Man Who Rode the Thunder in a box somewhere, but I don’t remember it being in my elementary school library. If it had been, I would have been all over that like flies on a severed cow’s head in a Damien Hirst installation.

Posted in Bagatelle, Books, Heroism, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 6, 2025.

February 6th, 2025

In honor of Valérie André, I am declaring a moratorium on French and French Army jokes for the next 72 hours.

She became a brain surgeon, a parachutist and a helicopter pilot who was said to be the first woman to fly rescue missions in combat zones for any military force. She was also the first Frenchwoman to be named a general and was a five-time winner of the Croix de Guerre, for bravery in Indochina and Algeria.

…

In 120 combat missions in the early 1950s in the dense jungles and soggy rice paddies of Indochina, where the French were trying without success to repulse Communist guerrillas, Dr. André flew 168 wounded soldiers from the battlefields to hospitals in Hanoi — including enemy soldiers, when there was room on the two litters mounted on her single-seat Hiller chopper.
She later flew 365 missions into combat zones in North Africa, where Algerians were seeking independence from France. In 1976 she was promoted to general, the first woman to be elevated to that rank in the French Army.

…

According to the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, she was one of the first 12 women in the world to receive a helicopter pilot rating and the first woman to fly a helicopter into combat zones.

She was 102 when she died.

Posted in Helicopters, Heroism, History, Obits, Planes | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 5, 2024.

February 5th, 2025

Lieutenant Colonel Harry Stewart Jr. (USAF – ret) has passed away. He was 100.

He was one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen who saw combat during WWII. (That’s the way the paper of record phrases it. I wondered about that phrasing, but according to Wikipedia (I know, I know):

On February 2, 2025, Lt Col. Harry Stewart Jr. died, thus leaving Lt. Col. George Hardy as the last surviving member of the original 355 Tuskegee Airmen who served in World War II. James H. Harvey, III, who did not serve in combat during World War II but who did later manage to be a member of the USAF’s inaugural “Top Gun” team in 1949 and serve in combat missions in the Korean War, lives as well, as does Lt. Eugene J. Robertson, who also did not serve in World War II combat missions.)

He flew 43 missions — almost one every other day — from late winter 1944 into the spring of 1945.
On one mission, to attack a Luftwaffe base in Germany, Lieutenant Stewart and six other American pilots were baited into a dogfight with at least 16 German fighter planes. Firing his machine guns and performing risky aerial maneuvers, he downed three enemy aircraft in succession, fending off a potential rout.
He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, cited for having “gallantly engaged, fought and defeated the enemy” with no regard for his personal safety.

Prince Karim Al-Hussaini, also known as The Aga Khan IV.

Urbane, cosmopolitan and often media-averse, the Aga Khan — born Prince Karim Al-Hussaini — rejected the notion that expanding his personal fortune would conflict with his charitable ventures. He said his ability to prosper complemented his duty to enhance the lives of Ismaili Muslims, a branch of the Shiite tradition of Islam with a following of 15 million people in 35 countries.

…

His projects included developing the island of Sardinia’s ritzy Costa Smeralda resort area, breeding thoroughbred racehorses and establishing health initiatives for the poor in the developing world.

…

Even though he had no inherited realm in the manner of other hereditary rulers, the Aga Khan’s fortune was variously estimated at $1 billion to $13 billion, drawn from investments, joint ventures and private holdings in luxury hotels, airlines, racehorses and newspapers, as well as from a kind of Quranic tithe levied on his followers.

Posted in Heroism, History, Horses, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 3, 2025.

February 3rd, 2025

Fay Vincent, former MLB commissioner. ESPN.

“List of people banned from Major League Baseball“.

Merle Louise Simon, who worked extensively with Stephen Sondheim.

Ms. Simon — who worked for most of her career under the name Merle Louise — began her run in Sondheim shows with “Gypsy,” in 1959, and continued with “Company” (1970), “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (1979) and “Into the Woods” (1987), Mr. Sondheim and James Lapine’s interpretation of fairy tales. (Mr. Sondheim wrote the lyrics for “Gypsy,” and the music and lyrics for the other shows.)
“Steve had a real history with Merle,” Mr. Lapine, who directed Ms. Simon in three roles, including the Giant in “Into the Woods,” said in an email. Mr. Sondheim, he added, “loved the energy she brought to the rehearsal room and the stage. Merle was usually the smallest person in the room but always the most ebullient and with the most glorious voice.”

…

She played Susan, a Southern belle going through a divorce, in “Company,” a series of vignettes that revolve around a bachelor learning about love, marriage and divorce from his married friends. She was then cast as the Beggar Woman, the crazed, long-lost wife of the title character in “Sweeney Todd,” a barber who slits the throats of unsuspecting clients.

Hey! New York Times! Spoilers!

Suzanne Massie.

An American-born author of books about Russian culture who spoke the language, Ms. Massie held a romantic view of what she called the Russian “soul,” and she formed a bond with a president who liked to understand and communicate complex issues through anecdotes about average people.

…

She became “Reagan’s window on the Soviet Union,” the historian James Mann wrote in “The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan” (2009), a study of his role in ending the Cold War. “She described the country and the Russian people to the president in terms that he understood and found useful.”
It was Ms. Massie who taught Mr. Reagan the Russian proverb “Doveryai no proveryai” (“Trust but verify”), which he uttered to Mr. Gorbachev when they met in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986 — and repeated so often that Mr. Gorbachev grumbled about it.

…

Although Ms. Massie corresponded with Mr. Reagan and met with him before and after trips she made to Moscow — including a private lunch on the Oval Office patio with the president and the first lady, Nancy Reagan — memoirs by Reagan officials involved in U.S.-Soviet relations portray her as a minor figure.
But Mr. Mann wrote that she “played a more significant role” than is generally known. She served as an unofficial emissary, carrying messages between Mr. Reagan and Moscow, and she humanized Russians for Mr. Reagan at a time when he was revising his view of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and reaching out to Mr. Gorbachev to ease nuclear tensions.

She was married to Robert K. Massie.

The couple’s first child, Robert, had hemophilia. Caring for him, which the Massies described in a searing memoir, “Journey” (1975), turned out to be an unlikely portal into Russian culture and, ultimately, the Oval Office.
The Massies learned that Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, the last of the Romanovs, had a son with hemophilia. Mr. Massie went on to write a best-selling history, “Nicholas and Alexandra” (1967), with Ms. Massie serving as editor and researcher. Seeking some respite from raising a disabled child, she took Russian lessons.

After their divorce, she married Seymour Papert.

James Carlos Blake, one of those authors I have heard of but have not read. The NYT compares him to Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry.

Rebellious, nomadic and prone to divorce (he was married four times), Mr. Blake was nearly as colorful a character as the ones who populated his fiction. Before turning to writing full time in his late 30s, he had been a paratrooper, snake catcher, mechanic, swimming-pool maintenance man, jail officer and teacher.

…

“Violence is the most elemental truth of life,” he told GQ magazine in 2012. “It’s the central shaper of history, the ultimate determiner of whether A or B is going to get his way. When push comes to shove — as so much has a way of doing — all moral considerations go out the window and it all becomes a matter of who’s going to be the last man standing.”

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, Sports, Theatre | Comments Closed

Well, that was easy.

January 31st, 2025

The updates to the list of US Congressional representatives for Texas have been completed.

Please let me know if you find any issues with the list.

Posted in Admin, Politics | Comments Closed

Quick preview of coming attractions (also relevant to Lawrence’s interests).

January 31st, 2025

I do intend to resume gun book blogging (and random gun crankery) soon.

Right now, I’m trying to finish the updates to the list of Texas congressional representatives. I’m about 1/3rd of the way through, and hope to have that done by the end of the weekend.

In the meantime, I thought I’d put up a quick post that’s sort of gun book related. Lawrence gets a fair number of possums in his yard. Or maybe just one possum, over and over again, that his dog keeps cornering. I don’t know for sure. I haven’t checked the serial numbers on his possums.

Anyway, I thought I’d throw this up as a preview from a forthcoming book: a recipe for “possum sausages”. I do think my use of this limited excerpt from How Wild Things Are by Analiese Gregory counts as “fair use”.

(Click to embiggen.)

One thing I do want to point out, though: Lawrence’s possums are the “Virginia opossum” (order Didelphimorphia). The possums the author is describing here are the “common brushtail possum” (order Diprotodontia), which are considered invasive in Tasmania. I suspect with enough pork back fat stuffed in, either one tastes good. Especially if you follow the recommended process of caging your possum for two weeks and feeding it fruit and veggies to reduce the “gamey” taste.

I do not know if the differences between Didelphimorphia and Diprotodontia make a difference to the cooking time or the taste of the possum sausage. I have not tried this recipe yet. (We don’t have a sausage/meat grinder. We do have a Kitchenaid stand mixer, but I would never buy the sausage stuffer attachment for it, as reliable sources say that is a POS.)

Posted in Books, Food, Hoplobibilophilia, Mammals | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 31, 2025.

January 31st, 2025

Dick Button, figure skating guy. I’ve never been a big skating fan, but I remember Mr. Button from when I was young and actually watched some of the Olympics.

An Emmy winner, Button taught generations of TV audiences the nuances of triple toe loops, lutzes and axels and how judges assess a skater’s performance. But many fans might not have known that he was a two-time Olympic gold medalist himself, advancing modern figure skating in the late 1940s and early ’50s with his dazzling leaps and spins, including the first triple jump in competition.

Marianne Faithfull. THR.

Iris Cummings Critchell. She was 104.

She competed as a swimmer in the 1936 Summer Olympics, and was the last surviving member of the American team.

While Iris didn’t win a medal at the 1936 Olympics, she went on to capture three national 200-meter breaststroke titles. But after the 1940 Olympics in wartime Tokyo were canceled, she put competitive swimming aside in favor of another passion that would hold her interest for the rest of her life: flying.

She flew with the Woman’s Air Force Service Pilots, ferrying planes across the country for shipping overseas.

After the war, Ms. Critchell received a bachelor’s degree with a concentration in science and mathematics from the University of Southern California, where she went on to teach aviation — an uncommon accomplishment for a woman at the time.

…

In 1962, she and Mr. [Howard] Critchell [her husband – DB], who was working as a commercial pilot for Western Airlines, began teaching in the Bates Foundation Aeronautics Program at Harvey Mudd College, where their students included the future astronauts George Nelson and Stanley G. Love. Ms. Critchell ran the program on her own after Mr. Critchell retired from teaching in 1979. When the program was shut down in 1990, she remained affiliated with the college, lecturing and working as a librarian there.

…

In addition to her work at Harvey Mudd College, Ms. Critchell created aviation outreach programs for public high schools, developed manuals for the Federal Aviation Administration and worked as a pilot examiner there for more than 20 years. She was a longtime member of the Ninety-Nines, a nonprofit organization supporting female pilots.
She also competed in women’s transcontinental air races, known informally as the Powder Puff Derby, a term coined by Will Rogers. In 1957, she finished first in a race to Philadelphia from San Mateo, Calif., sharing an $800 prize with her co-pilot, Alice Roberts.

Posted in History, Music, Nazis, Obits, Planes, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

This flaming hyena goes to 11.

January 30th, 2025

Robert “Gold Bar Bob” Menendez sentenced to 11 years in prison.

(Previously on WCD.)

Posted in Law, Politics | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 28, 2025.

January 28th, 2025

The California Historical Society.

The society, a private nonprofit organization established in 1871 and designated the state’s official historical society in 1979, is one of California’s oldest historical organizations. But unusually among state historical societies, its leadership said, it received no regular state funding, which left if vulnerable to the vagaries of private donations.

…

The society’s treasures include the Kemble Collections on Western Printing and Publishing, which features books, pamphlets, product labels, trade catalogs and other items produced in the American West between 1802 and 2001. The society also holds the archives of many organizations, like the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the California Flower Market, Inc., founded by Japanese American flower merchants in 1912.

…

In 2016, it was tapped by the city of San Francisco as its lead partner for a potential restoration of the Old United States Mint in downtown San Francisco, one of the few structures to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire. But restoration of the building, which had been largely unused for decades, was deemed prohibitively expensive.

I think that would have been a very cool thing to tour. But I understand the cost.

In early 2020, the group announced a new strategic plan that involved selling its 20,000-square-foot building near Union Square and using the proceeds to support traveling shows and partnerships with smaller organizations around the state. But that effort was thwarted by the pandemic and downturn in San Francisco’s real estate market, as well as the unexpected death in 2022 of Alicia L. Goehring, the executive director and chief executive who helped formulate the plan.

It might have been smarter to build a dedicated historical museum in some place like the state capital. But that’s just my opinion.

In 2022, Gonzalez said, the group requested a one-time grant of $12 million to support a partnership with the University of California, Riverside, which would have involved collaborating with Native American tribes to bring historical projects to underserved parts of the state.
The request was rejected. “The legislature gave us the same answer we heard from philanthropic organizations: This sounds like something a university should be doing,” Gonzalez said.

Wait, wait: the California legislature rejected a proposal to spend taxpayer money?

This actually makes me kind of sad. I like state historical societies, and I hate to see one fall apart like this.

But: their collections and archives are being transferred to Stanford University. I guess the school is now the de facto historical society, and that may not be such a bad thing overall.

Posted in California Über Alles, History, Museums, Obits | 1 Comment »

Update 2.

January 28th, 2025

The Travis County commissioners list has been updated.

I also made some minor tweaks to the list of US Senators from Texas.

We apologize for the convenience.

Posted in Admin, Politics, Travis County | Comments Closed

Update.

January 27th, 2025

The list of Austin City Council members has been updated.

I’ve included staff members when I can, but several of the newer city council members don’t have their staff listed yet. Probably still hiring…

Posted in Admin, Austin, Politics | Comments Closed

Tomorrow is promised to nobody, so keep your eyes open.

January 27th, 2025

An errant weight thrown by a competitor struck and killed a spectator at a youth track and field meet in Colorado, according to officials at the university where the competition was held.
The hammer — a heavy ball on a chain — in the hammer throw event cleared certified barriers before striking the man Sunday morning at the University of Colorado’s Colorado Springs campus, according to a university statement.

(Previously on WCD.)

Posted in Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 27, 2025.

January 27th, 2025

Jan Shepard, actress.

Other credits include a lot of TV westerns, “Highway Patrol”, “The F.B.I.”, “G.E. True“, “TV Reader’s Digest” (????)…

…and “Mannix”. (“Another Final Exit“, season 1, episode 20. She was “Rose”.)

Arthur Blessitt. He was a preacher in LA in the late 1960s, and ran “a Christian coffeehouse adjacent to a strip club”.

“Like, if you want to get high, you don’t have to drop acid. Just pray and you go all the way to Heaven,” he wrote in “Life’s Greatest Trip” (1970), one of his many religious tracts. “You don’t have to pop pills to get loaded. Just drop a little Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.”

One day, he heard God telling him to carry a cross on foot from Los Angeles…to New York City. So he did. But that was just the start.

It took him six months to walk across the country. When he was done, he returned to Los Angeles, only to receive — in his telling — orders from Jesus to take his journey global.
“Go!” Jesus told him, he recounted on his website. “I want you to go all the way.”

…

Mr. Blessitt kept meticulous notes abroad, detailing how long his boot soles lasted (about 500 miles) and how often he was arrested (24 times). He visited every continent, including Antarctica, as well as war zones, disaster zones and many other places where he was liable to get shot at, beaten or arrested.
He climbed Mount Fuji in Japan, confronted angry baboons in Kenya and was nearly blown up by a terrorist bomb in Northern Ireland — all while carrying his cross. He is listed in Guinness World Records for the “longest ongoing pilgrimage.”
It took him nearly 40 years, but in 2008 he completed his quest to visit every country when he was permitted to enter the last, North Korea. His “trek” there was largely symbolic: Authorities let him carry his cross from the front door of his hotel to the street and back.

…

His decades-long campaign made him a minor celebrity. Profiles invariably zeroed in on his combination of dogged perseverance and an aw-shucks approach to his task.
“You’d be amazed,” he told People magazine in 1978, “how much attention a man carrying a big wooden cross gets.”

Posted in Elvis, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Religion, TV | Comments Closed

Short gun crankery.

January 25th, 2025

I refer from time to time to the “Hillary Hole”, aka the internal lock on many recent Smith and Wesson revolvers. This made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad idea.

Greg Ellifritz posted this article in his weekly link roundup this week. While I do regularly read the Revolver Guy blog, I missed this one before now, and I want to bookmark it for future reference.

“The History and Future of the Smith & Wesson Internal Lock”.

Posted in Bookmarks, Guns, Politics, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

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