For the record, my plan is to update the various politician lists (city council, commissioners court, reps, senators) sometime after, but close to, January 20th.
I know some of these folks have been sworn in already, but waiting until after the 20th gives people a chance to get their web sites updated and things in order.
Leslie Charleson, actress.
Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “Emergency!”, “Search”…
…and “Mannix”. (“A Chance at the Roses”, season 3, episode 16.)
This is still breaking, but: Mike McCarthy is supposedly out as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys.
ESPN, who is attributing this to “a source”.
Sam Moore, of Sam and Dave.
At their peak in the 1960s, Sam & Dave churned out rhythm-and-blues hits with a regularity rivaled by few other performers. When “Soul Man” topped the R&B charts and crossed over to No. 2 on the pop charts in 1967 (it also won a Grammy), its success helped open doors for other Black acts to connect with white audiences.
Sam & Dave’s live shows were so kinetic — they were known as the Sultans of Sweat and Double Dynamite — that even as charismatic a performer as Otis Redding was hesitant to be on the bill with them, for fear of being upstaged. Mr. Moore once spoke of his need to “liquefy” the audience before he considered a show a success.
“The strength of Sam & Dave,” he said, “was that we would do anything to please the audience.”
…
…
(Dave Prater died in a car accident in 1988.)
Burning in Hell watch: James Arthur Ray. People who have been reading this blog for a long time may remember that name, as I covered his actions and the resulting criminal case early on.
Mr. Ray was a “self-help guru” who killed three people in a sweat lodge in Sedona, Arizona.
Mr. Ray packed about 50 people into a temporary structure made of a round wood frame covered in tarps, measuring about 25 feet in diameter and only five feet at the center. He poured gallons of water over fire-heated rocks, filling the lodge with hot steam.
Though he told participants they could leave at any time, many said later that they felt pressured by him to stay. Eventually the conditions inside grew unbearable, and the crowd flooded out; many people collapsed on the ground.
Someone called 911; one first responder later said that the scene looked like the site of a mass suicide. Twenty-one people were taken to the hospital.
Three of them died — James Shore and Kirby Brown were declared dead on arrival, while Liz Neumann died nine days later. Mr. Ray was arrested shortly afterward on manslaughter charges.
Mr. Ray was convicted of three counts of negligent homicide and sentenced to two years in prison.
“I am responsible,” he said about the sweat-lodge disaster.
At the end of the film, he added: “It had to happen, because it was the only way I could explore and learn and grow through the things that I’ve done. Am I drinking the Kool-Aid? Maybe, but the Kool-Aid works for me.”
Am I reading that right? Three people had to die in great agony so James Arthur Ray could “explore and learn and grow”?
Hell is too good for him.
(Obligatory note that it was Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid.)
–Roger Ebert
On Tuesday, the Las Vegas Raiders fired Antonio Pierce as head coach.
Yesterday, they fired Tom Telesco as general manager. One season, 4-13.
In other news, Sean Dyche is out as manager of Everton. Everton is apparently a soccer team.
(I would have sworn I posted this yesterday, but I just found this in my drafts. Apologies.)
This came across Greg Ellifritz‘s “Weekend Knowledge Dump” a few weeks ago, and I thought it was worth sharing:
“46 Things (and Counting) a Young Man Should Know”.
47. Carry a sharp knife, unless precluded by law or venue policy. It doesn’t have to be a machete or Bowie knife: even a small Swiss Army knife or pocketknife is worthwhile.
48. Carry a small flashlight. You can get ones that clip on your keychain and throw a surprising amount of light, and you have no idea how handy they are until you start using them.
Also by way of Mr. Ellifritz: “52 Things I Learned in 2024”.
And by way of Mike the Musicologist: “Big Pistols vs. Small Pistols”, by FotB (and official trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn.
The NYT obit wants to attribute her career decline to her anti-gay views. But was that really the case? Or did her career go into eclipse because American musical tastes changed? I honestly don’t know.
Mike the Musicologist tipped me off to an interesting story from Louisiana.
Tyrin Truong is the mayor of Bogalusa. He’s 23, which makes him the youngest mayor in Bogalusa’s history, and one of the youngest ever in the state.
And he got busted on Tuesday for drug trafficking.
But, apparently, no blow. Which is kind of disappointing, because:
…
“unauthorized use of a moveable”?
Even before officially becoming mayor, Truong did not shy away from political battles and controversies. As mayor-elect, he pushed for the resignation of the Bogalusa police chief after a Black man died in the department’s custody.
During his tenure he encouraged law enforcement to patrol more in Bogalusa, but also suggested the city could dissolve its 33-officer police force and transfer responsibilities to the Washington Parish Sheriff’s office to save money.
What kind of expenses?
The articles don’t specify if that was a down payment on a new Prius or an outright purchase of a used one. I did run the numbers, and that works out to $14.61 a pound for the bourbon steak tips. I don’t know if that’s a good price or not: my H-E-B app does not list steak tips (with or without bourbon) at my local store. I also can’t find “bourbon steak tips” online – I was thinking that might be something Omaha Steaks sells – but I did find lots of recipes for “bourbon” and “honey bourbon” steak tips online. Might be something worth trying.
Clasby also arranged for the city to pay over $38,000 to a New York consulting company owned by his friend, federal prosecutors said.
The consulting company didn’t provide any goods or services to Quincy, federal prosecutors said. Instead, Clasby’s friend cashed the city’s checks and gave Clasby the money at three separate places: A rest stop in Framingham, a ferry terminal in Bridgeport, Connecticut and at the friend’s New York apartment.
Okay, now you’re just being scummy instead of amusing. But we’ll always have the “signed, lacquered, framed portrait” and the studio recordings of his singing. Not that I’ve found those anywhere yet, but I’m sure prosecutors will be entering those into evidence and playing them for the jury.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front party in France (now the National Rally).
An arm-waving reactionary with the swagger of a circus pitchman making outrageous claims, Mr. Le Pen ran unsuccessfully for the French presidency five times, making it to a runoff in 2002, riding waves of discontent and xenophobia and raising specters of a new fascism as he excoriated Jews, Arabs, Muslims and other immigrants — anyone he deemed to be not “pure” French.
Mr. Le Pen’s youngest daughter, Marine Le Pen, succeeded him as leader of his party, the National Front, in 2011 and rose to prominence on a tide of populist anger at the political mainstream. She was defeated in France’s presidential elections three times — in 2012, placing third with 17.9 percent of the vote behind François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy; in 2017, with 33.9 percent, losing to the centrist Emmanuel Macron; and in 2022, with 41.5 percent, defeated again by Mr. Macron.
But that year’s elections also sent a record number of representatives from the party, renamed National Rally, to the lower house of Parliament — 89 in all — testimony to the success of Ms. Le Pen’s efforts to normalize it and moderate its message in some regards.
By then it had became the leading opposition party, no longer an outcast widely viewed as a threat to the republic, and in 2023 the National Rally backed Mr. Macron’s bill restricting immigration, an embarrassment for the French president.
Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary.
There was a story in the NYT the other day that I thought was interesting, for reasons I’ll get to shortly.
Yujin Choi was a rising young prosecutor in the Denver district attorney’s office.
In 2021, Ms. Choi made her first allegation against Dan Hines, a criminal investigator in the district attorney’s office. She told supervisors that he had made an inappropriate comment to her.
Mr. Hines, who joined the office in 2019 after spending 10 years in the military and 20 years with the Pennsylvania State Police, retiring as a troop commander, denied the allegation.
“The investigation was closed as unsubstantiated,” according to the ruling, but Mr. Hines was transferred within the office and was ordered not to contact Ms. Choi.
…
In October 2022, Ms. Choi said that Mr. Hines sent her four inappropriate text messages.
So what makes this story interesting? Turns out…
While she provided screenshots of the messages, questions about their authenticity quickly surfaced.
The first text had a time stamp that was about 40 minutes after Ms. Choi had already reported it to her superiors, according to the ruling.
She said that she did not want a formal investigation and did not cooperate with it, the ruling said, but the prosecutor’s office felt obligated to move forward with an inquiry.
When confronted with the new allegations, Mr. Hines immediately demanded a polygraph test and offered his phone for inspection. A forensic search of his phone did not show any communication between his number and Ms. Choi’s, according to the ruling.
The investigation further revealed that Ms. Choi had texted the inappropriate messages to herself. In addition, she changed the name in her phone to make it appear as though Mr. Hines was the one who had sent them.
The investigation found that Ms. Choi downloaded and altered a spreadsheet containing her Verizon message logs before she provided those records to investigators.
Yes, it is the all-time, but not often seen, classic “B—h set me up!” story. And it seems like she was singularly inept at the “setting up” part. But wait, there’s more.
The weekend before her phone and laptop were to be examined for evidence of the alleged misconduct by Mr. Hines, Ms. Choi told investigators that her phone had fallen into her bathtub after she had drawn herself a bath and put her phone on a tray.
She said that she dried it right away but found that it was not working. She then went to her desk to make a video call to a colleague, according to the ruling. After the call, still in a panic over her phone, she knocked over a bottle, spilling water on her laptop, and leaving that disabled as well.
…
Ms. Choi has been disbarred.
…
Ms. Choi told the disciplinary office that she did not intentionally harm Mr. Hines because she did not make any formal statement against him until the office forced her to participate in its investigation.
In asking for leniency, she said that she was under financial stress and that she had been a lawyer only for a short time. The court office noted in its ruling that Ms. Choi’s repeated deception and lack of remorse persuaded it to go beyond suspending her law license and to seek disbarment.
Mr. Hines said he was livid about the way the internal investigations were handled, and the damage done to his reputation and mental and physical health. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against the district attorney, Beth McCann, the city and county of Denver and the prosecutor’s office.
In case you’re wondering, the DA’s office says that “Ms. Choi’s casework was later found to be in ‘excellent order,’ with no evidence of fabrications.”
Bloody Monday felt like sort of a nothing burger. I think what we may see is firings trickling out over the course of the week.
Starting with today: Ran Carthon out as general manager of the Tennessee Titans.
The Titans, by the way, have the number one pick in the upcoming NFL draft. Also by the way, they are keeping Brian Callahan as head coach.
Personally, I’d like to see Carthon, Callahan, Amy Adams Strunk, and every other person who was involved with the Titans wearing Houston Oilers throwback uniforms placed in stocks in front of the stadium and pelted with rocks and garbage.
ESPN.
Brian Schneider out as special teams coach of the San Francisco 49ers, who were 6-11 this year.
Edited to add: ESPN is reporting that Antonio Pierce has been fired as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. This seems to be backed up by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, but that’s not a great newspaper, so I’m sticking with ESPN.
The Raiders were 4-13 this season: Pierce came on as an interim coach in 2023 (and went 5-4), and this was his first and only full season.
This is your official thread for today’s NFL coach firings. I will try to keep this thread updated throughout the day, but I have some things going on later in the afternoon that may interfere.
Doug Pederson out as head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars. (That link may give you trouble about your ad blocker, but if you reload that seems to clear it. Archive.is seems to be having problems right now, or I would put up the archive version.) 4-13 this season, and 22-29 in Pederson’s three seasons. However, the team is keeping Trent Baalke as GM. ESPN.
Interestingly, the New York Football Giants have apparently decided to keep general manager Joe Schoen and head coach Brian Daboll, even though the team finished 3-14 this season and 6-11 last year.
Edited to add: “Sources say” Lou Anarumo is out as defensive coordinator of the Cincinnati Bengals.
Not a NFL firing, but Wes Goodwin is out as defensive coordinator at Clemson.
Edited to add: Ryan Grubb out as offensive coordinator of the Seahawks according to “sources”.
The NYPost is running their own “Black Monday” ticker as well.