Continuing adventures in hoplobibliophilia.

August 28th, 2022

I think I’ve brought this up before, but, since the recent unpleasantness, pickings have been sort of slim at Half-Price Books. Sometimes I’ll stumble across something, but it doesn’t seem like they’re getting as much good stuff as they used to.

Today was one of those stumble across days. We happened to be in the neighborhood dealing with the Mongolian fire drill that is Dan’s on a Saturday morning for breakfast, so I thought I’d duck in for a few minutes. And I walked out with a haul. Including not one, but two original Samworth books. (Technically, one is a reprint, but it is an original Samworth book.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 1911, Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 26, 2022.

August 26th, 2022

Joe E. Tata, actor.

Credits other than “Beverly Hills, 90210” include “Monster Squad”, the 1966 “Batman” series, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, “The Outer Limits”, “Mission: Impossible”, and “Lost in Space”.

He also did a fair number of cop/PI/procedural shows, including “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “The F.B.I.”, “Cannon”, “Quincy M.E.”, eight episodes of “The Rockford Files”…

…and “Mannix”. (“A World Without Sundays”, season 7, episode 8. “A Problem of Innocence”, season 6, episode 23. “What Happened to Sunday?”, season 4, episode 15.)

E. Bryant Crutchfield, inventor of the Trapper Keeper.

By way of Mike the Musicologist: a nice tribute to Richard Taruskin from Alex Ross. (Link goes to archive.is because I’m not sure how long that will stay available for non-subscribers.)

By way of The Mysterious Bookshop: Michael Malone, novelist and TV writer. He won a Daytime Emmy for “One Life to Live”, and an Edgar Award in 1997 (Best Short Story for “Red Clay”, in the anthology Murder for Love).

Posted in 1970s, Books, Mannix, Music, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 25, 2022.

August 25th, 2022

Jerry Allison, drummer with the Crickets.

Mr. Allison was still a teenager in Lubbock, Texas, when he began playing with Mr. Holly, who was three years older and had already made a tentative start on a music career, releasing a few records in Nashville that did not do well. Back in Lubbock, he, Mr. Allison, Niki Sullivan on guitar (soon replaced by Sonny Curtis, Tommy Allsup and others) and Joe B. Mauldin on bass began honing a sound that drew on Elvis Presley and on country and, especially, Black music.

…

Then, in May 1956, he and Mr. Holly went to see a new John Wayne movie, “The Searchers,” in which one of Mr. Wayne’s most memorable lines was “That’ll be the day.”
Days later, according to an account written for the Library of Congress, Mr. Holly suggested that he and Mr. Allison write a song together, and Mr. Allison, imitating the Wayne line, said, “That’ll be the day.”
“Right away, Buddy starts fiddling around with it,” Mr. Allison told the Lansing newspaper. “In about a half-hour, we had it.”
Mr. Holly cut a country version of the song in Nashville that was unloved (a producer there is said to have called it “the worst song I’ve ever heard”), but in 1957 he and the Crickets, as his Lubbock group was called, recorded a rock ’n’ roll version that became a national hit and remained in Billboard’s Top 30 for three months. Mr. Holly, Mr. Allison and the producer who recorded that version, Norman Petty, got the songwriting credit, and in 2005 the record was selected for the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.

Gerald Potterton. He directed the 1981 “Heavy Metal”. Other credits include some work on “Yellow Submarine” and “The Railrodder“. (I have previously covered that Buster Keaton film in this space, but the videos are no longer available on the ‘Tube. There is a version that’s not from the Canadian NFB, but I can’t vouch for it.)

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Barbecue Law!

August 24th, 2022

La Barbecue is a popular Austin joint. It is in the Texas Monthly Top 50, though not in the Top 10.

The owner and manager of La Barbecue have been criminally indicted.

[Leanne] Mueller and [Allison] Clem are each charged with two counts of fraudulent securing of document execution.

What does that mean? Here’s how the Statesman explains it. La Barbecue didn’t have worker’s comp insurance, and hadn’t had it since November of 2014. Sometime in July of 2016, one of their employees was hurt “while operating a piece of kitchen equipment”. It sounds like the injuries were pretty serious: I’ll get into that in a minute.

Four days later, Clem contacted Paychex Insurance to get workers’ compensation coverage, something the restaurant had been without since November 2014.
Clem did not disclose her employee’s injuries to the agent but asked that the new policy be backdated to July 1, 2016, three weeks before the employee was hurt, the Texas Department of Insurance reported.

This kind of strikes me as equivalent to being in a car accident, then calling your insurance agent to get backdated coverage. I would call this “insurance fraud”. But: I am not a lawyer.

“It is perfectly legal to obtain a backdated policy in Texas,” said the women’s attorney, Brian Roark.

Which may be true. But it is legal to obtain a backdated policy, then make a claim against that policy for an accident that happened while coverage was not in place?

Mueller then submitted a signed application for coverage, claiming the business had no previous losses, and the policy was approved by Travelers Casualty Insurance Co. of America, the department said.

According to the article, Travelers paid out “$350,000 in medical and indemnity benefits”. In addition, “The insurance company is also responsible for lifetime care of the injured employee.”

“The insurance company determined early on that they didn’t believe they should have to pay for the claim, yet continued to pay for it anyway,” Roark said. “Regardless of the insurance company’s determination, La Barbecue, Leanne Mueller and Allison Clem believed they were acting in good faith at all times when they signed the application that had been provided to them by the insurance agent. All the monies paid for the employee were paid to the employee or directly for his medical expenses and not to La Barbecue, Leanne Mueller or Allison Clem. We believe once a jury hears the facts, that La Barbecue, Leanne Mueller and Allison Clem will be exonerated.”

If they are convicted, supposedly the two can be made to pay restitution “up to double the amount Travelers already paid to the injured worker in benefits”.

I’d hate to lose a good barbecue joint (though I’ve never had a chance to eat at La Barbecue). But I think this goes to show at least one thing: it’s just ignorant not to have worker’s comp insurance.

(More from eater.com. Crossposted to The Logbook of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.)

Posted in Beef, Food, Law | 1 Comment »

The Agony of…something or other.

August 24th, 2022

It isn’t exactly defeat. This makes falling off the end of a ski jump look tame.

By way of a comment on Reddit’s “Hobby Drama” sub, I learned that there is such a thing as the International Tank Biathlon World Championship. The 9th one of those is either wrapped up or just wrapping up. Yes, it did go on: it was not called on account of WAR, though the page linked above seems to be confused about whether this is the 2022 or 2021 edition.

But wait, there’s more! We have a Twitter thread! With video! And commentary!

Two highlights. Number one is a clip from “Fast 12: Tank Drift”:

Number two: everything is better with music.

And this goes out to the Saturday Night Movie Group:

Posted in Bagatelle, Sports | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: August 24, 2022.

August 24th, 2022

Len Dawson, one of the greats. NYT.

Known as “Lenny the Cool” for his composure and guile on the field, Dawson was the Chiefs’ starter for 14 seasons, including their appearances in Super Bowl I and Super Bowl IV.

…

Dawson, a strapping 6-footer with wavy hair and a killer smile, began working as a sports anchor for KMBC-TV (Ch. 9) during his playing days in 1966, not stepping down until 2009. He also served as an NFL color commentator for NBC Sports for six years; was co-host for HBO’s “Inside the NFL” for 24 years; and was the Chiefs’ radio analyst from 1984 to 2017.

…

In 1987, Dawson was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, just 20 miles from his childhood home of Alliance, Ohio. Dawson, inducted into the Chiefs Hall of Fame in 1979, also was selected 1972 NFL Man of the Year, an award that honors a player’s contributions both on the field and in the community.
Dawson’s work as a broadcaster was recognized in 2012, when he received the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, 25 years after he was enshrined as a player. Dawson, Frank Gifford, Dan Dierdorf and John Madden are the only members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame who also received the Rozelle Award, which recognizes “longtime exceptional contributions to radio and television in professional football.”

…

In his 19-year professional career, Dawson completed 2,136 passes in 3,741 attempts for 28,711 yards, 239 touchdowns and 183 interceptions. His 183 games played for the Chiefs ranks third among non-kickers to only Will Shields’ 224 and Tony Gonzalez’ 190. And Dawson completed more passes (2,115) for more yards (28,507) and more touchdowns (237) than any quarterback in Chiefs history.

…

More important to Dawson was the contribution he and the Chiefs played in Kansas City, a town searching for its major-league identity.
“The games themselves don’t mean that much,” he said. “You tend to forget the details. But our success was important to Kansas City. I like to think our football team played a part in changing the minds of people about Kansas City. That is the most significant thing to me.”

Tim Page, Vietnam war photographer. (Alt link.)

A freelancer and a free spirit whose Vietnam pictures appeared in publications around the world during the 1960s, he was seriously wounded four times, most severely when a piece of shrapnel took a chunk out of his brain and sent him into months of recovery and rehabilitation.
Mr. Page was one of the most vivid personalities among a corps of Vietnam photographers whose images helped shape the course of the war — and was a model for the crazed, stoned photographer played by Dennis Hopper in “Apocalypse Now.”
Michael Herr, in his 1977 book “Dispatches,” called him the most extravagant of the “wigged-out crazies” in Vietnam, who “liked to augment his field gear with freak paraphernalia, scarves and beads.”

…

He published a dozen books, including two memoirs, and most notably “Requiem” a collection of pictures by photographers on all sides who had been killed in the various Indochina wars.
Issued in 1997 and co-authored by his fellow photographer Horst Faas, it was a memorial that he considered one of his most important contributions. The collection was put on permanent display in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina (affiliate link to used copies on Amazon). I’ve mentioned it before, but I think this is a great book.

His closest encounter with death came in April 1969 when he stepped out of a helicopter to help offload wounded soldiers and was hit with shrapnel when a soldier near him stepped on a mine.
He was pronounced dead at a military hospital, then was revived, then died and was revived again, finally recovering enough to be transferred to the United States, where he endured months of rehabilitation and therapy before picking up his cameras and heading back to work.
During this time, in an event that consumed much of his later life, two fellow photographers headed on motorcycles down an empty road in Cambodia in search of Khmer Rouge guerrillas and never returned.
Over the following decades, Mr. Page made repeated forays into the Cambodian countryside in a futile search for the remains of the two men, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone.

This goes unmentioned in the obit, and isn’t strictly relevant, but I find it an interesting historical footnote: Sean Flynn was Errol Flynn’s son (by his first wife, Lili Damita). To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Flynn and Mr. Stone have never been found: “In 1984, Flynn’s mother had him declared dead in absentia.”

Personal indulgence: Doris Emily Bedford Gerlat. She was the mother of my beloved and indulgent Uncle Allan (who is married to my beloved and indulgent Aunt Cheryl: the two of them are responsible for the Major Award among other things).

Posted in Books, History, NFL, Photography, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 23, 2022.

August 23rd, 2022

Gary Gaines, former football coach at Odessa Permian.

His record from 1986-89 was 47-6-1.
Gaines led Permian to the fifth of the program’s six state championships with a perfect season in 1989, then left to become an assistant coach at Texas Tech.

Yes, this is the coach from “Friday Night Lights”, the book (affiliate link) and movie (ditto).

“I just can’t find the words to pay respects,” Ron King, a former Permian assistant, told the Odessa American. “It’s a big loss for the coaching profession. There are a lot of coaches he took under his wing and mentored.”
Gaines, who was played by Billy Bob Thornton in the 2004 movie, said he never read the book and felt betrayed by Bissinger after the author spent the entire 1988 season with the team.

Vincent Gil, Australian actor. Credits include “Chopper Squad”, “Riptide” (the 1969 series), “Cop Shop”, “A Cry in the Dark”, and “Nightrider” in the first “Mad Max” movie. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Boats, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Brief belated historical note.

August 23rd, 2022

I had a day off yesterday and did a lot of running around, so I missed this:

50 years ago yesterday, on August 22, 1972, John Wojtowicz, Robert Westenberg, and Salvatore Naturile tried to hold up a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank in Brooklyn.

Things did not go well. They expected to take between $150,000 and $200,000, but when they got to the bank, an armored truck had taken most of the money away. They got a total of $29,000 and tried to get away: Westenberg escaped, but Wojtowicz and Naturile didn’t manage to get away before the police showed up. The attempted bank robbery turned into a hostage situation…

…and if all this sounds familiar, yes, this was the famous “Dog Day Afternoon” robbery.

50th anniversary retrospective from the NYT.

Posted in History, Law, Movies | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 22, 2022.

August 22nd, 2022

Virginia Patton, actress. She had a short career: most notably, she was apparently the last surviving adult member of the “It’s A Wonderful Life” cast. (Karolyn Grimes, who played “Zuzu”, is still alive, as is Jimmy Hawkins, who played “Tommy”.)

Josephine Tewson. She did a lot of British TV, some of which made it to PBS here. Most notably to my people, she was “Elizabeth”, the neighbor of “Hyacinth Bucket” in “Keeping Up Appearances”.

By way of Lawrence: Alexi Panshin, SF author.

Tom Weiskopf, noted golfer.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Quick legal note.

August 19th, 2022

Fotios Geas, Paul J. DeCologero and Sean McKinnon have been charged with crimes related to the murder of Whitey Bulger.

They’ve all been charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.

Mr. Geas, 55, who is known as “Freddy,” and Mr. DeCologero, 48, known as “Pauly,” were also charged with aiding and abetting first-degree murder, as well as assault resulting in serious bodily injury. Mr. Geas faces an additional charge for murder by a federal inmate serving a life sentence.
Mr. McKinnon, 36, who was on federal supervised release when he was indicted and arrested in Florida on Thursday, faces a separate charge of making false statements to a federal agent.

Posted in Law | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 19, 2022.

August 19th, 2022

Norah Vincent, author.

Her first book, Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man (affiliate link) was about the 18 months she spent passing as a man.

But the book was no joke. It was a nuanced and thoughtful work. It drew comparisons to “Black Like Me,” the white journalist John Howard Griffin’s 1961 book about his experiences passing as a Black man in the segregated Deep South. David Kamp, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called Ms. Vincent’s book “rich and audacious.”

Her second book, Voluntary Madness: Lost and Found in the Mental Healthcare System (affiliate link) was about the time she spent in various mental hospitals after suffering a breakdown during her time posing as a man.

…While in treatment, she said, she thought to herself: “Jesus, what a freak show. All I have to do is take notes and I’m Balzac.”
What transpired was less tidy than “Self Made Man,” however. As she toured mental institutions — a Bellevue-like urban one, a high-end facility in the Midwest and finally a New Age clinic — Ms. Vincent found herself increasingly mired in depression and juggling a cocktail of medications. The book’s conclusion did not endear her to reviewers, as she exhorted those in extremis like her to move on and “put your boots on.”

She also wrote Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (affiliate link). During the process of writing the book, she tried to kill herself.

Ms. Vincent was a lesbian. She was not transgender, or gender fluid. She was, however, interested in gender and identity. As a freelance contributor to The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice and The Advocate, she had written essays on those topics that inflamed some readers.
She was a libertarian. She tilted at postmodernism and multiculturalism. She argued for the rights of fetuses and against identity politics, which she saw as infantilizing and irresponsible. She did not believe that transsexuals were members of the opposite sex after they had surgery and had taken hormones, a position that led one writer to label her a bigot. She was a contrarian, and proud of it.

She sounds like someone who would have been interesting to meet. She was 53: according to the obit, she died at a medically assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Quick flaming hyena update.

August 18th, 2022

By way of Lawrence: remember the police chief and his Earth, Wind, and Fire cover band?

15 years in prison.

Posted in Law, Music, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 17, 2022.

August 17th, 2022

Wolfgang Petersen. THR.

In America, Petersen was all about action. He made eight films in the U.S. and enjoyed a string of five straight box office hits: the political thriller In the Line of Fire (1993), starring Clint Eastwood as a Secret Service agent; Outbreak; Air Force One (1997), starring Harrison Ford as the U.S. president; The Perfect Storm (2000), with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg as ill-fated seamen; and the epic Troy (2004), starring Brad Pitt as Achilles.

Was “Troy” really a “hit”? Wikipedia says:

Troy grossed $133.4 million in the United States and Canada, and $364 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $497.4 million, making the film one of the highest grossing films of 2004, alongside The Passion of the Christ, Spider-Man 2 and Shrek 2.

But it cost $185 million to make. If you use the rule of thumb of three times budget to make a profit, “Troy” falls short. Using the 2.5X rule, it may have made a relatively small profit. And do you hear anybody talking about “Troy” these days?

I don’t have a dog in this fight: I haven’t seen “Troy”, but would not mind seeing it. The only Peterson film I have seen is “Das Boot”, but I’d actually like to see almost all of his others…

…except “Poseidon”, which I think everyone agrees was a bad idea that pretty much killed his career. (He has one credit in IMDB as a director and producer after that, and that was a German film in 2016. Which, to be honest, does sound good.)

Posted in Movies, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 16, 2022.

August 16th, 2022

Nicholas Evans, author. (The Horse Whisperer)

Michiko Kakutani, writing in The New York Times, called it “a sappy romance novel, gussied up with some sentimental claptrap about the emotional life of animals and lots of Walleresque hooey about men and women.”
“About the only thing missing,” she added, “is a picture of Fabio on the cover.”

In spite of that, it was a huge hit, as you know, Bob. Also, I have to give mad props to the guy for being a survivor: he had melanoma while writing the book. And then, in 2008…

He and his second wife, Charlotte Gordon Cumming, a singer-songwriter, were staying with her brother, Alastair Gordon Cumming, and his wife, Lady Louisa, in the Scottish Highlands. They had picked and enjoyed a meal of wild mushrooms, which turned out to be poisonous. All four became sick, and their kidneys soon failed. Mr. Evans, Ms. Gordon Cumming and her brother required years of dialysis — and new kidneys. Mr. Evans’s daughter Lauren donated one of hers. Ms. Gordon Cumming was offered the kidney of her son’s best friend’s mother, and Mr. Cumming’s came from a patient who had died. Mr. Evans became a patron of a kidney donation charity. Ms. Gordon Cumming made a documentary film about her experience.

…

His reviews grew more positive with every book. Nonetheless, he tended to avoid reading them.

Pete Carril, basketball coach at Princeton. He never won a championship, but his teams played well.

His record at Princeton was 514-261, with 13 Ivy titles, 11 appearances in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s championship tournament, two in the National Invitation Tournament (his team won in 1975) and only one losing season. Fourteen of his Princeton teams led the nation in defense. In 1997, he was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.
He emphasized a deliberate off-the-ball offense that kept players passing the ball and setting screens until a shooter was open or someone broke free to the basket in a patented backdoor play. The scores were low, and no matter how much opponents prepared, they were frustrated and often lost their poise.

…

Every year at his first practice session, Carril made the same speech to his players.
“I know about your academic load,” he said. “I know how tough it is to give up the time to play here, but let’s get one thing straight. In my book, there is no such thing as an Ivy League player. When you come out of that locker room and step across that white line, you are basketball players, period.”
But he also told his players:
“Princeton is a special place with some very special professors. It is something special to be taught by one of them. But you are not special just because you happen to go here.”

Posted in Books, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

DEFCON 30 notes.

August 15th, 2022

Lawrence (who I hope is feeling better) pinged me over the weekend about missing DEFCON 30 coverage. (At least, that’s what I think he was pinging me about: his email was kind of cryptic.)

There are some things going on here.

One is that, as I said last week, I was in a mood. It takes a lot of time and effort to pull together the preliminary list of DEFCON panels, the day to day coverage, and the post-DEFCON writeups. That effort is even harder now, because Twitter has pretty much removed the ability to view more than a couple of a person’s tweets without being signed in. I just didn’t have it in me last week.

Which kind of leads to the second reason: it just doesn’t seem that my DEFCON coverage gets the level of engagement that justifies the effort. As far as I can tell, people just aren’t all that interested in it. That may be (probably is) a flaw on my part as a writer, it may be that my audience just isn’t interested in computer security subjects, or it may be that I’m completely misreading what people are interested in.

It also feels like DEFCON has moved beyond me in the post-Wuhan Flu world. It used to feel like a gathering of one of my tribes. Now, it costs $360 (“with a processing fee of $9.66 added to online orders”). Masks are required. And supposedly, you may run into trouble with the hotel if you want to bring a legal firearm. (Hattip: McThag.) They’re also still doing that weird “semi-hybrid” model again, and I’m just not willing to spend a bunch of time hanging out on Discord.

(I’m pretty sure I stayed at that “s–tball” Travelodge on my last DEFCON trip. “they just want their $56 per night and prefer you to not leave used heroin works in the potted plants outside” seems pretty accurate.)

The last thing is: I’ve seen almost no other coverage or discussion of DEFCON 30 this year. At least not in the places I’d expect to see it: Wired, ArsTechnica, or HackerNews. ThreatGrid did a round-up post this morning if you want a different take than mine, but other than that, I’ve seen nothing.

I went and checked the schedule (which you can find here: I haven’t found the media server yet.) One thing that is really nice is that they’ve added much more information to the schedule entries, including links and references where available.

And…there just are not a lot of presentations this year that I find interesting. I can see why people would be interested in “Computer Hacks in the Russia-Ukraine War“, but at only 20 minutes, I have questions.

Maybe “Wireless Keystroke Injection (WKI) via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)” because Bluetooth, but that’s not so much breaking Bluetooth as it is pretending to be a legit Bluetooth device.

“The PACMAN Attack: Breaking PAC on the Apple M1 with Hardware Attacks” and “Process injection: breaking all macOS security layers with a single vulnerability” probably have some relevance to Apple folks. So does “The hitchhacker’s guide to iPhone Lightning & JTAG hacking“. And I can see the interest in “Glitched on Earth by humans: A Black-Box Security Evaluation of the SpaceX Starlink User Terminal“, but I don’t have a Starlink terminal to play with.

“You’re Muted Rooted” has the Zoom thing going for it. I’ll confess to a small amount of interest in “HACK THE HEMISPHERE! How we (legally) broadcasted hacker content to all of North America using an end-of-life geostationary satellite, and how you can set up your own broadcast too!” and no interest at all in this year’s “Hippy, please.” one.

“Defeating Moving Elements in High Security Keys” does sort of get my attention. And that’s the last thing that does.

It just feels smaller and less interesting. Perhaps DEFCON is still finding their footing again after the last two years. I don’t know. I also don’t know if I’m going to do anything next year.

Posted in Apple, Bluetooth, DEFCON, DEFCON 30, Radio | 3 Comments »

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