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

Obit watch: January 24, 2025.

January 24th, 2025

Aaron De Groft. I don’t think many people will recognize the name, but his story allows me to indulge one of this blog’s interests: art crime.

Mr. De Groft was the director of the Orlando Museum of Art.

In February 2022, the Orlando Museum of Art opened a blockbuster exhibition of 25 paintings that Mr. [Jean-Michel] Basquiat was said to have created in 1982, when he was 22 and living in Venice, Calif.
Mr. De Groft said that Mr. Basquiat had sold the artworks, most of them painted and drawn on slabs of cardboard, for $5,000 in cash, and that they had languished for decades in a Los Angeles storage unit. In 2012, Mr. De Groft said, the storage unit was foreclosed for lack of payment and the contents auctioned off. A little-known dealer purchased the artworks for about $15,000.

Mr. Basquiat is a big deal in the art world, and this was a major coup for the musuem.

At the time of the exhibition, they were said to be worth nearly $100 million. Some museum staff members raised concerns about their authenticity but were rebuffed by the museum’s board chairwoman and threatened by Mr. De Groft with termination if they publicly aired their skepticism.

Hmmmm. Hmmmm hmmmm hmmm. Hmmm.

Days after the exhibit opened, The New York Times published an article raising questions about the paintings. The article noted doubts expressed by several curators, and reported that one of the paintings was made on a piece of cardboard shipping material containing a printed FedEx typeface not used by that company until 1994 — six years after Mr. Basquiat’s death and 12 years after Mr. De Groft and the painting’s owners said the painting was made.
The F.B.I. raided the museum four months later, confiscating all 25 works. An affidavit revealed that the bureau had been investigating the artworks and their owners for a decade.

Hmmm!

Mr. De Groft was fired. The museum sued him.

After the Basquiat exhibit was shut down, a Los Angeles auctioneer admitted to the F.B.I. that he had helped create the faux Basquiats in 2012, some in as little as five minutes.
Mr. De Groft countersued the museum for wrongful termination, calling their claims a “public relations stunt intended to save face.” He still insisted that the Basquiats were genuine.
He said the artworks’ owners had commissioned a forensic investigation by a handwriting expert, who identified the signatures on many of the paintings as being Mr. Basquiat’s. He also cited an analysis by a Basquiat expert — since disavowed — and statements by a member of the Basquiat estate’s now-defunct authentication committee, who found the paintings to be genuine.

The status of the lawsuits is unclear. The Wikipedia section in Basquiat’s entry on “Forgeries” is interesting.

Jack De Mave, actor. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “The Fugitive” (the original), “Adam-12”, and an uncredited role in “1776”.

Posted in Art, Law, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#141 in a series)

January 24th, 2025

Joseph Molina Flynn is a lawyer in Rhode Island. He specializes in immigration law. He was also a municipal judge in Central Falls, Rhode Island.

“Was” because he resigned on Thursday…

…after the FBI raided his offices.

The investigation into Molina Flynn started before President Donald Trump took office and is unrelated to his immigration-related executive orders, according to two people with direct knowledge about the investigation who would only speak on the condition of anonymity.
They said federal agents are looking at Molina Flynn over allegations that he defrauded people seeking representation on immigration-related matters.

Molina Flynn was the first openly gay person and the first formerly undocumented person to serve on the bench in Central Falls, according to the city.

He moved to the United States from Colombia when he was nine years old, according to a biography on his website, and he obtained lawful permanent status 15 years later before becoming a U.S. citizen.

No charges have been filed. Yet. But it sure seems like there’s something there. Plus, I don’t get to use the “Rhode Island” category often enough.

Posted in Law, Politics, Rhode Island | Comments Closed

Happy birthday, John Moses Browning!

January 23rd, 2025

Not really much more to say JMB wise. The day sort of snuck up on me, and the weather this week has not been conducive to taking photos.

SHOT show is going on through tomorrow. I’m not sure if they have any JMB tributes planned, not actually being there for the show and all.

(I did take a look at the requirements for getting media credentials. Frankly, they seem kind of onerous. But it might be worth taking a shot for 2026. What’s the worst that could happen? They say no and I save the price of a ticket to Vegas?)

Speaking of SHOT…as you know, Bob, I am an unabashed Smith and Wesson fanboy. Also as you know, Bob, I own some stock in Smith & Wesson Brands Inc. so I have a vested interest in how well the company does.

With that out of the way, the’ve been introducing some interesting things in the past week or so.

  • They’ve extended the line of “Ultimate Carry” revolvers by adding two new ones in .32 H&R Magnum with titanium cylinders. I already have my Ultimate Carry in .38 Special, but I might very well pick up one of these.
  • They’ve introduced new “Mountain Guns” in .357 Magnum and .44 Magnum. Also something that’s tempting. The new ones are stainless steel, but it looks like the kind of dull stainless finish that I have on my 625 and I don’t find that obnoxious.
  • The “no lock” classics: Model 10, Model 19, and Model 36 with no internal lock.
  • Steel framed M&P pistols.
  • And some new lever-action 1854 rifles.

I’m personally kind of excited about the way things are going.

(By the way: I wouldn’t exactly say I “missed” National Buy an AK Day. It was just there were so many things happening on Monday that I didn’t really want to post. Plus, I feel like the pressure is off at least until January 20, 2029.)

Posted in Guns, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

January 22nd, 2025

Trent Baalke is out as general manager of the Jacksonville Jaguars.

“Following several discussions with Trent Baalke this week, we both arrived at the conclusion that it is in our mutual best interests to respectfully separate, effective immediately,” Jaguars owner Shad Khan said in a statement.

Sounds sort of like a combined resignation-firing, so I’m chalking it up as a firing.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: January 22, 2025.

January 22nd, 2025

Jules Feiffer, artist. He was perhaps most famous as a cartoonist for the “Village Voice”, but he also did some movie and theater work.

In the mid-1950s, Norton Juster, a neighbor of Mr. Feiffer’s in Brooklyn, invited him to illustrate a children’s book he was writing, “The Phantom Tollbooth.” An ingenious kaleidoscope of wordplay arguably akin in style to Lewis Carroll, the book, published in 1961, was an instant hit.

…

Around 1980, the movie producer Robert Evans recruited Mr. Feiffer to write the screenplay for Robert Altman’s “Popeye.” Mr. Feiffer patterned his script after the Segar newspaper strip, not the animated adaptations made by the Fleischer brothers in the 1930s and ’40s. When E.C. Segar’s daughter saw the movie, Mr. Feiffer told The Comics Journal in 1988, she called to tell him that he had captured the essence of her father’s creation — at which, Mr. Feiffer added, he cried. Though it met a mixed critical reaction, the film, starring Robin Williams as Popeye and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl, was a hit.

…

In May 1997, Mr. Feiffer ended his affiliation with The Village Voice over a salary dispute. “It’s not that I’ve slipped,” he said at the time. “It’s that I’m too expensive.” (In April 2008, he returned for a one-shot, full-page take on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.)
Later in life he derived great pleasure from writing and drawing children’s books, some in collaboration with his daughter Kate, among them “The Man in the Ceiling” (1993), “Bark, George” (1999), “By the Side of the Road” (2002), “The Daddy Mountain” (2004) and “A Room With a Zoo” (2005). A 2010 reunion project with Mr. Juster, “The Odious Ogre,” was warmly reviewed.

Garth Hudson, of the Band.

During its peak, the Band was famously a collaborative operation informed by the songwriting and barbed guitar playing of Robbie Robertson and the soulful singing and musicianship of Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. But critics and his fellow band members agreed that Mr. Hudson played an essential role in raising the group to another level entirely.
Mr. Robertson, quoted in Barney Hoskyns’s 1993 book, “The Band: Across the Great Divide,” called him “far and away the most advanced musician in rock ’n’ roll.” “He could just as easily have played with John Coltrane or the New York Symphony Orchestra as with us,” Mr. Robertson said.

Posted in Media, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#140 in a series)

January 18th, 2025

Remember Sheng Thao? The former mayor of Oakland? “Former” because she got tossed out of office in a recall election in November?

She was indicted on Friday. Also indicted: Andre Jones, who the NYT describes as her “boyfriend”, David Trung Duong, and Andy Hung Duong. David Duong is the head of a local waste management company, and Andy is his son.

Patrick D. Robbins, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, said on Friday that Ms. Thao in October 2022 had agreed to extend a city contract with the waste company, California Waste Solutions, buy housing from the Duongs and use her influence to help them in exchange for a campaign mail effort and side payments that would benefit her and Mr. Jones.
California Waste Solutions then spent $75,000 on an attack mailer that helped Ms. Thao’s campaign in the 2022 mayoral election, prosecutors said. After Ms. Thao took office, the company paid $95,000 to Mr. Jones for a “no-show” job and had promised additional payments to the couple in exchange for Ms. Thao’s influence at City Hall, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors alleged that Ms. Thao followed through by taking steps to help companies owned by the Duongs and by appointing a high-level city official that they had selected.

The charges against her are pretty much standard. You got your mail fraud, you got your wire fraud, you got your bribery and conspiracy.

Efforts to remove Ms. Thao from office had begun long before she was publicly linked in June to a federal investigation. Early in her tenure, residents of Oakland, often regarded as a gritty and soulful alternative to San Francisco, had become increasingly frustrated with the city’s high crime rates, a widening budget deficit and the loss of major league sports teams. Ms. Thao’s decision to fire a popular police chief also rankled her critics.

…

But the efforts by Ms. Thao and labor allies to fight the recall were ultimately unsuccessful. In November, less than two years into her term, more than 60 percent of voters chose to remove Ms. Thao from office. Pamela Price, the district attorney for Alameda County and another progressive Democrat, was also recalled on the same ballot.

Posted in California Über Alles, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 18, 2025.

January 18th, 2025

Jean Jennings, automotive writer. I remember her from back in the day when I was reading Car and Driver (she went by Jean Lindamood at the time).

Mrs. Jennings was hired at Car and Driver by David E. Davis Jr., a renowned figure in automotive journalism. In 1986, he took her with him after Rupert Murdoch offered to support a new type of car magazine, Automobile, which was aimed at more discerning readers and featured writers like P.J. O’Rourke, David Halberstam and Jim Harrison. Mrs. Jennings proved more than capable of keeping up with them.
“She and David were the only ones writing anything other than fanboy notes,” Kathleen Hamilton, a childhood friend who later worked for her at Automobile, said in an interview. “It was enthusiast writing, and she brought adventure to the car-world reader.”

I sort of halfway read “Automobile”, by which I mean I mostly thumbed through it on the newsstands but never bought an issue. I think I had checked out of the car magazine scene by the time she became Mrs. Jennings.

She was 70, which seems awfully young to me these days. Alzheimer’s got her.

Posted in Cars, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: January 17, 2025.

January 17th, 2025

As promised, David Lynch. NYT. This is the same THR obit link from yesterday, but I think they’ve substantially updated it since I originally posted.

David Lynch PSA for the New York City Department of Sanitation. (Hattip: NYPost.)

Roger Ebert’s one-star review of “Blue Velvet”.

Joan Plowright, actress. IMDB. I feel bad that I don’t have more to say about here, but I just don’t.

Nathalie Dupree, cookbook author and personality. She’s actually someone I’d heard of, but didn’t really have a lot of context for. The obit makes it sound like she would have been a fun person to know, more so in her Diet Coke days.

Ms. Dupree had a particular blend of Southern hospitality and risqué charm. Over the course of her career she was called “the Julia Child of the South,” “the queen of Southern cooking” and “the anti-Martha Stewart.”
She shocked the host Katie Couric by ending an elegant entertaining segment on the “Today” show, in which she prepared an entire pork crown roast, by presenting a supermarket chocolate cake. She filmed episodes of her television show with a red AIDS ribbon pinned to her apron, a bold move in the 1980s, when conservative suburban women made up much of her audience.
“She is one of the few people in my life who seems more like a fictional character than a flesh-and-blood person,” the novelist Pat Conroy wrote in “The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes and Stories of My Life” (2009), after taking one of Ms. Dupree’s classes. “You never know where Nathalie is going with a train of thought; you simply know that the train will not be on time, will carry many passengers and will eventually collide with a food truck stalled somewhere down the line on damaged tracks.”

…

Her early television shows, orchestrated solely by Ms. Graubart, were sponsored by a Southern flour company. Ms. Dupree wanted the kitchen segments to run with no edits. With a smear of flour on her face, she might leave ingredients half prepared or forget to add them altogether. She wiped her hands on her apron a lot and once searched around for her diamond ring that had fallen off as she cooked.
“Whatever happens to me is going to happen to you,” she’d tell audiences after a mistake.
“She was a hot mess, and that’s what people loved her for,” Ms. Graubart, who coauthored “Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking” in 2012 with Ms. Dupree, said in a phone interview.

Posted in Food, Movies, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Random crankery (mostly gun books, a little gun stuff, a little electronic stuff).

January 16th, 2025

I didn’t manage to get everything done that I wanted to get done during my extended vacation from work. In particular, gun crankery and gun books kind of went by the wayside, for reasons of time and weather.

The gun crankery is still coming. And a thought occurred to me the other day: I can actually do some quick gun book crankery, because I have three new gun books in the stack and can just point folks to those books online. Don’t need to pull out the bibliographies or take pictures. Yes, it is lazy, and yes, there will be less lazy gun book crankery coming. Consider this a stopgap.

More seriously, I do think these new books are worth writing about and promoting to my readers.

In order to avoid disappointing my gun book buddies, I’m going to put the gun books up front. After those, I’m going to talk about one new gun-related item, and one new non-gun related item, so anyone who wants can skip over the non-book parts (or can skip to the non-book parts).

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books, Christmas, Geek, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Smith and Wesson, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 16, 2025.

January 16th, 2025

This is breaking news, but: David Lynch. I wouldn’t ordinarily post anything this early, but I happened to be writing this obit watch when the news broke. Expect more tomorrow.

Bob Uecker. ESPN. IMDB. Baseball Reference.

Uecker proved himself undistinguished during his six seasons as a major leaguer in the 1960s. He eked out a career batting average of just .197, hit 14 home runs and drove in 74 runs. A career reserve player, he never started more than 62 games in a season for the Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves, the St. Louis Cardinals or the Philadelphia Phillies.

“Anybody with ability can play in the big leagues,” he once said. “But to be able to trick people year in and year out the way I did, I think that was a much greater feat.”

The sight of Uecker perched at such a distance became so much a part of his image that, in 2014, a statue of him was installed in the faraway reaches of the upper deck of Miller Park in Milwaukee.

“I can’t think of a better place to put it,” he said. “It’s great for the fans and even better for the pigeons.”

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

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