Alex Murdaugh has been officially disbarred.
There are also reports circulating that he’s going to be charged with killing his wife and son, but so far those are just “reports”. I’ll try to update if and when an actual indictment is returned.
Update 7/14: The indictment is official.
Charlie Montoyo out as manager of the Toronto Blue Jays.
Toronto is currently 46-42 and is 15 1/2 games out of first place.
More from ESPN. As you know, I don’t like using ESPN that much, but in this case, the other Toronto media outlets either had no story, required a subscription, or would not load.
Bench coach John Schneider has been named interim manager for the rest of the season.
Does this mean those Duke boys are at it again?
Leg Lamp Mug, from the Christmas Story House. A gift from my beloved and indulgent aunt and uncle.
L.Q. Jones. Beyond “The Wild Bunch” and other Peckinpah films, credits include writing, producing, and directing “A Boy and His Dog”, based on the Harlan Ellison novella.
Adam Wade. Other credits include “B.J. and the Bear”, “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, and “Come Back Charleston Blue”.
Tony Sirico. THR. Other credits include “Goodfellas”, “Police Squad!” (“In Color!”), and “Jersey Shore Shark Attack”.
Lenny Von Dohlen. “Tender Mercies” is a swell movie, and you should watch it if you haven’t. Other credits include “The Equalizer”, “Walker, Texas Ranger”, and multiple appearances on “The Pretender”.
Susie Steiner. This is kind of sad. She was a British novelist who broke out in 2016 with a crime novel, “Missing, Presumed” that got a lot of attention.
Around that time, she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa and gradually went legally blind. She wrote two more novels, “Persons Unknown” and “Remain Silent” in the same series as “Missing, Presumed” (featuring Manon Bradshaw). In 2019, she was diagnosed with “glioblastoma, grade 4”, which eventually killed her.
Bill J. Allen. I hadn’t heard of him, but I wanted to highlight the obit because I find it interesting.
Mr. Allen was an Alaskan businessman.
As the president and chief executive of the Veco Corporation, an engineering and services company he co-founded in 1968, Mr. Allen sat at the intersection of Alaska’s vast oil industry and the equally vast political interests arrayed around it.
He specialized in greasing the connections between the two, shuffling money into the coffers of friendly politicians, who in turn kept companies like Veco flush with work. By the early 2000s, Veco was the largest Alaska-owned and Alaska-based company, with 3,500 employees, 18 subsidiaries and $400 million in annual revenue.
He allegedly threw around a lot of money to get his way.
Eventually he and one of his vice presidents, Rick Smith, settled into an almost comically corrupt arrangement with a coterie of state politicians.They regularly booked a suite at the Westmark Baranof, a luxury Art Deco hotel four blocks from the State Capitol in Juneau, where they dished out money and told their visitors what they wanted in return.
Mr. Allen and his circle seemed to revel in their shamelessness. He and Mr. Smith always booked Suite 604, and Mr. Allen always sat in the same chair. He bragged that he kept $100 bills in his front pocket, the easier to dole them out to friendly politicians. The girlfriend of one politician even had hats embroidered with the letters CBC, for “Corrupt Bastards Club.”
The Feds wiretapped the room and eventually came down on them. Mr. Allen was also alleged to have sexually assaulted underage girls, though as far as I can tell he was never charged with any criminal offense related to this.
Mr. Allen became the government’s key witness in a string of corruption and bribery cases against state and federal politicians, several of whom were convicted.
The most prominent of them, Senator Ted Stevens, was indicted in 2008 on charges that he had failed to register a series of gifts from Mr. Allen, notably an extensive renovation of the senator’s home south of Anchorage.
The two had been friends — they even owned a racehorse together — but that didn’t prevent Mr. Allen from providing critical testimony against the senator, telling the jury that Mr. Stevens had used an intermediary to ask him not to send a bill for the renovation.
As you may know, Bob, Senator Stevens was convicted and lost his re-election bid. As you may also know, Bob, three months after he was convicted, it came out that the government had witheld potentially exculpatory evidence (“including an interview in which Mr. Allen said he had never spoken with Mr. Stevens’s intermediary“) from Mr. Stevens’s defense team, the charges were dropped, and Mr. Stevens was killed in a plane crash in 2010.
For the historical record, since everyone is on this like a fat man on an all you can eat buffet: Shinzo Abe. Alt link. The Mainichi. Japan Times.
Larry Storch. 249 acting credits in IMDB: beyond “F-Troop”, they include “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, “The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington”, “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, “Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp”, “Airport 1975″…
…and “Mannix”. (“Another Final Exit“, season 1, episode 20. “Portrait in Blues“, season 8, episode 1.)
Edited to add: NYT obit for Mr. Storch, which probably went up as I was writing this.
Gregory Itzin. Credits other than “24” include “Airplane!” (and “Airplane II: The Sequel”, but he went uncredited in that), “Street Hawk”, “Lou Grant”, and “FBI: The Unheard Music Untold Stories”.
Bradford Freeman. He was 97.
Mr. Freeman was a private first class assigned to a mortar squad in Easy Company, Second Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. He took part in the unit’s jump behind Utah Beach in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, carrying an 18-pound mortar plate strapped to his chest. Landing in a pasture filled with cows, he helped a fellow soldier with a broken leg hide before joining the rest of his squad.
He fought with Easy Company in its battles with the Germans in France, its parachute drops into the German-occupied Netherlands and the Battle of the Bulge, in bitter cold and snow.
He was unscathed in the fighting at the Bulge’s strategic town of Bastogne, Belgium, but he was wounded at nearby Noville in mid-January 1945. “A Screaming Mimi came in howling and it exploded in my leg,” he told the American Veterans Center in an April 2018 interview, referring to the nickname given by G.I.s to the Germans’ devastating multiple rocket launchers. He returned to Easy Company in April 1945 and participated in its occupation of Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s abandoned mountain retreat near the Austrian border, and then in the occupation of Austria.
According to the paper of record, he was the last surviving member of Easy Company.
Ni Kuang. Interesting guy: he wrote a bunch of screenplays for Shaw Brothers movies, and went on to write a lot of Chinese SF and fantasy. He also hated Commies.
His 1983 novel, “Chasing the Dragon,” was widely cited as a prescient description of the political backdrop that prompted pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, followed by a sweeping crackdown.
In the book, Mr. Ni writes about an unnamed metropolis that is reduced to a shell of itself:When asked by Mr. Shieh of RTHK what disappearing merits he meant, Mr. Ni said, “Freedom.”
“Freedom of speech is the mother of all freedoms,” he continued. “Without freedom of speech, there is no other freedom at all.”
I saved James Caan for last because I wanted to put in a jump. NYT.
Possible spoilers follow for two of his best movies:
Peter Brook, noted theater director.
…
Joe Turkel. He was the rare Kubrick repeater (the bartender in “The Shining”, one of the executed soldiers in “Paths of Glory”, and a thug in “The Killing”) Other credits include “The Sand Pebbles”, “Blade Runner”, and “Ironside”.
Bruno ‘Pop N Taco’ Falcon. Credits include “Breakin'”, “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”, “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey”, and “Captain EO”.
Richard Taruskin, musicologist.
An emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a specialist in Russian music, Mr. Taruskin was the author of a number of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. He was also a contributor to The New York Times, where his trenchant, witty, and erudite writings represented a bygone era in which clashes over the meaning of classical music held mainstream import.
“He was the most important living writer on classical music, either in academia or in journalism,” said Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, in a recent interview. “He knew everything, his ideas were potent, and he wrote with dashing style.”
…
…
Mr. Taruskin’s most consequential flamethrowing was his campaign against the movement for “historically authentic” performances of early music. In a series of essays anthologized in his 1995 book “Text and Act,” he argued that the use of period instruments and techniques was an outgrowth of contemporary tastes. He didn’t want conductors like Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Roger Norrington to stop performing; he just wanted them to drop the pretense of “authenticity.” And many did.
“Being the true voice of one’s time is (as Shaw might have said) roughly 40,000 times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history,” he wrote in The Times in 1990. “To be the expressive medium of one’s own age is — obviously, no? — a far worthier aim than historical verisimilitude. What is verisimilitude, after all, but correctness? And correctness is the paltriest of virtues. It is something to demand of students, not artists.”
…
“I have always considered it important for musicologists to put their expertise at the service of ‘average consumers’ and alert them to the possibility that they are being hoodwinked, not only by commercial interests but by complaisant academics, biased critics, and pretentious performers,” he wrote in 1994.
Mr. Ross said: “Whether you judged him right or wrong, he made you feel that the art form truly mattered on the wider cultural stage.” Mr. Taruskin’s polemics, he added, “ultimately served a constructive goal of taking classical music out of fantasyland and into the real world.”
Apropos of nothing in particular (no, really, I ran across this link before my vacation and have been meaning to post it):
Edward Stratemeyer & the Stratemeyer Syndicate
Whodewhatnow? Edward Stratemeyer was an author who created the Stratemeyer Syndicate, an early book packager. The Stratemeyer Syndicate brought us the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift, among other series.
There’s a lot to mine here. Ever hear of “Ralph of the Railroad“? And I’m kind of wanting to find some “Ted Scott” books as a Christmas present for Someone Who Isn’t Me.
Apologies for missing Gavrilo Princip Day on Tuesday. I was distracted by some car issues that turned up on both cars in the house: thankfully, those turned out to be minor.
This is not a holiday I usually celebrate, but to make up for missing the last one: Happy Bobby Bonilla Day!
Yes, I know it is baseball. But it also sort of counts as “epic failure”, which makes it more relevant to this blog. (That’s “epic failure” for the Mets, not for Mr. Bonilla.)
I wanted to break this out from the others for reasons.
Jeffrey Richardson, an officer with the Poteet Police Department, was killed yesterday.
Poteet is a small city near San Antonio. According to reports, Officer Richardson was working an off-duty job in a construction zone near the Domain in Austin when he was struck and killed by a possibly impaired driver.
This one goes out to Lawrence:
Betty Rowland was 106 when she passed on April 3rd. Her death was not widely reported until recently.
John Visentin, the CEO of Xerox. He was 59, and passed due to “complications from an ongoing illness” according to a company statement.
Sonny Barger, founder of the Hells Angels. Cancer got him at 83.
…
Barger was sentenced to 10 years to life behind bars in 1973 after he was convicted of possession of narcotics and a weapon by a convicted felon.
He was paroled in November 1977 after serving four-and-a-half years of his sentence, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported.
…
…
…
Barger was convicted of conspiracy in October 1988 and was sentenced to four years in jail.
He was released from FCI Phoenix in November 1992 after serving three-and-a-half years behind bars.
Edited to add: NYT obit, which was not up when I originally posted.
Every once in a while, I’ll mention a Smith and Wesson and say it is a J-frame or a K-frame or some other letter-frame.
Generally, I try to provide some context, for the benefit of the non-Smith and Wesson fans who make up part of my audience. However, I am not always successful at that.
I’ll add this to the “reference” section on the sidebar, too. Come to think of it…
No, no, don’t thank me: I run a full service blog here.
This is not an endorsement, and I am not getting anything from anybody for this.
In addition to those fancy Japanese toilets, something else I’ve wanted in my house when I win the lottery is a GeoChron. Maybe more than one GeoChron: I don’t know that I need one in every room, but at least the office and bedroom…
Yes, they are rather expensive. But how can you put a value on having your office look like a scene from The Hunt For Red October?
There used to be (for all I know, still is) a PC program that worked as both a stand-alone executable and also as a screen saver, that emulated the GeoChron but with a considerable omount of flexibility. That included additional map packages and zoom ability. As far as I know, though, that hasn’t been ported to other platforms, and I’m not sure if it is even still maintained or works with new versions of Windows.
I hadn’t looked at the GeoChron website in a while, but I did today. Turns out: the GeoChron people have gone digital. It’s a box (“Is like: a very heavy candy bar“) that plugs into the HDMI port of your 4K TV or monitor and provides…a GeoChron. Complete with Internet connectivity so you can download more stuff. They even offer a Ham Radio Bundle.
Still a touch expensive, but: I can get a 4K (Amazon Fire) TV for $200. $30 for a wall mount. $100 for someone to install the wall mount. Suddenly, that $4,500 GeoChron is about $800. This isn’t quite couch cushion money, but it also isn’t lottery winner money.
Very interesting. Very interesting indeed.
This one is short and lazy because I missed the story, while Lawrence is on it like flies on a severed cow’s head in a Damien Hirst installation.
…
On June 30, 2020, Dolcefino entered Jordan’s courtroom to question the judge about his lack of action on a series of complaints of public corruption. Dolcefino was wearing a hidden camera to document the interaction.
According to the video evidence, Jordan at first greeted Dolcefino, but then told the reporter he would not answer his questions and threatened to hold him in contempt if he persisted. Moments later, Jordan had Dolcefino shackled and taken to jail.
The following day, television cameras recorded guards ushering Dolcefino back into the courtroom in handcuffs and a jail-issued orange jumpsuit. Jordan then sentenced him to three days in jail and 180 days of probation. After Dolcefino appealed, Jordan added an alcohol monitor and random drug tests to his probation conditions.
Although Jordan maintained he had been holding virtual hearings when Dolcefino entered, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later overturned Dolcefino’s conviction, writing, “after a review of evidence and arguments, the contempt of court allegation is not supported by the habeas corpus record.”