You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#84 in a series)

March 25th, 2022

Missed this yesterday, but: Jeff Fortenberry (R-Nebraska) was convicted. (Previously.)

A federal jury deliberated less than two hours before convicting the nine-term Nebraska congressman on one count of concealing conduit campaign contributions and two counts of lying to federal agents.

…

The congressman faces up to five years in prison on each count, although he could also receive supervised release.
Ironically, he does not have to give up his congressional seat. Federal law requires members of Congress to give up their seats only for crimes that are tied to treason.

I’m sorry, but you know I have to do this.

Going back to the story, though, he does face a primary challenge from Mike Flood (a state senator).

The investigation ramped up when the FBI discovered that a Nigerian billionaire, Gilbert Chagoury, had been funneling cash into the campaigns of four Republican politicians: former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, current California Rep. Darrell Issa, former Nebraska Rep. Lee Terry and Fortenberry.
It is illegal for U.S. elected officials to accept foreign money.
The World-Herald asked prosecutor Mack Jenkins, who led the case with the help of prosecutors Susan Har and Jamari Buxton, if Fortenberry would have been prosecuted had he gotten rid of the money soon after learning it was suspect. The other three politicians weren’t prosecuted; they got rid of any illegal money soon after they were confronted. Fortenberry took 2 ½ years to give his to charity. And was evasive along the way.

Mitt Romney, you say? Hmmmm hmmmm hmmmm.

In other news, I don’t know that I want to do a full flaming hyenas on this one, but I can’t resist the NYPost:

It was the usual: she got drunk…

…allegedly said one girl was an “acne f–ker,” and hurled multiple insults at other young girls as well.
“Hispanic f–ker,” she allegedly said to one girl attending the sleepover and “judgy f–ker,” to another.

She also threw up in a laundry basket and someone’s shoe. The article doesn’t specify if the shoe belonged to “judgy f–ker”, but I’d personally be pretty judgy if someone threw up in my shoe.

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Obit watch: March 24, 2022.

March 24th, 2022

Madeleine Albright. WP.

Victor Fazio (D-California).

Mr. Fazio represented the Sacramento area from 1979 to 1999. As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, he helped bring home funding for numerous projects, including a multimillion-dollar environmental institute at the University of California, Davis. He also lobbied for the funds to protect 3,700 acres of wetlands west of Sacramento as a refuge; dedicated by President Bill Clinton in 1997, it is known as the Vic Fazio Yolo Wildlife Area.

John Roach.

He was instrumental in prodding Tandy to venture into the computer market. At the time, most small computers were sold as kits to be assembled by hobbyists, but Mr. Roach believed that consumers would welcome a model that they just needed to plug in.
His team presented the original TRS-80 prototype — cobbled together from a black-and-white RCA monitor, a keyboard and a videocassette recorder — to Tandy’s chief executive, Charles Tandy, and to Lewis Kornfeld, the president of RadioShack, in January 1977.
The Apple 1 had been introduced the year before, and Commodore and other companies were marketing their own home computers, but the TRS-80 (the initials stood for Tandy RadioShack) quickly became, for a time, the most popular computer on the market.

…

“We were finally able to ship some machines in September and shipped 5,000 that year, all we could assemble,” Mr. Roach said. “Our competitors shipped none.”
At just under $600 (about $2,700 in today’s dollars), the computer was relatively cheap (it was $399 if connected to a separately owned viewing screen). It was available in all 8,000 of the company’s stores.

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Obit watch: March 23, 2022.

March 23rd, 2022

Lawrence tipped me off to the deaths of two actors which (per the policy of this blog) I have to note here.

Lawrence Dane. Yeah, yeah, “Bride of Chucky”. Other credits include “Lancer”, “Mission: Impossible”, “The F.B.I.”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Fly, Little One”, season 3, episode 21. “Overkill”, season 4, episode 24.)

Howard “Pepper” Martin. Sorry for the sourcing, but I haven’t seen this elsewhere.

Other credits include “Quincy, M.E.”, the 1990 revival of “Dragnet”, “T.J. Hooker”, “240-Robert”, seven appearances on “The Rockford Files”, six appearances on “Police Woman”, “Mission: Impossible”, four appearances on “Police Story”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Bearcats!”…

…and he was a “Mannix” three timer. (“A Catalogue of Sins”, season 1, episode 11. “Last Rites for Miss Emma”, season 2, episode 22. “The Color of Murder”, season 4, episode 22.)

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Obit watch: March 21, 2022.

March 21st, 2022

Av Westin, TV news guy. (“20/20”)

Dr. Julian Heicklen, “a charismatic, cantankerous chemistry professor who dedicated his retirement years to a series of public protests in defense of civil liberties” as the paper of record describes him. He was 90.

What is sort of buried in the NYT obit is the actual nature of his protests. He was an advocate of jury nullification:

Rain or shine, he arrived every Monday — the day when juries are typically chosen — holding a sign reading “Jury Info” and handing out yellow pamphlets that explained the meaning and history of jury nullification.
Though he typically stood alone, he was one of many around the country engaged in similar protests, motivated by concerns about what they saw as unjust laws and prosecutorial overreach and convinced that jurors willing to take the law into their own hands were the last barrier to tyranny.

This being New York City, he was indicted in 2010 on charges of “jury tampering”.

The case drew extensive coverage, giving Dr. Heicklen the sort of platform he had only dreamed of, and he played it for all he could. At his bail hearing, he hung his head and refused to speak, leading the judge to ask if he was sleeping.
“I’m exercising my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent,” he finally piped up. At his arraignment hearing, he laid into the judge and prosecutors for what he called their “tissue of lies.”
The case was short-lived: Judge Kimba M. Wood threw it out in April 2012, ruling that as long as Dr. Heicklen was not targeting individual jurors, he was merely exercising his First Amendment rights.

…

“The case cleared the way for people across the country to be able to engage in jury nullification advocacy without the threat of federal prosecution,” Chris Dunn, the legal director for the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview. “He stood out there every day fighting what he viewed as unjust prosecutions and unjust criminal laws. And that’s admirable, classic political protest.”

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Obit watch: March 19, 2022.

March 19th, 2022

John Korty, director.

He won an Emmy for “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and an Oscar for the documentary “Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids?” Other credits included “Go Ask Alice” and “Oliver’s Story”.

Robert Vincent O’Neil, writer and director. Among his credits: the original “Angel” (“High School Honor Student by Day. Hollywood Hooker by Night.”) and the sequel “Avenging Angel”. Also, the series “Lady Blue” which I do not remember:

Lady Blue starred Jamie Rose as no-nonsense Chicago cop Katy Mahoney and Danny Aiello as her boss. The MGM Television series was criticized by some for its excessive violence and canceled after 14 episodes. (Rose said she watched Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films and worked with the actor to prepare for the role.)

Don Young (R-Alaska).

In a state whose small population allows for two senators but only one representative, Mr. Young, who cultivated the image of a rugged frontiersman with outsize clout in Washington, was sometimes called Alaska’s “third senator.” To this day, most Alaskans have had no congressman in their lifetimes but Mr. Young, who was first elected in 1973, during the Nixon administration.
Early in his 24th term in 2019, he became the longest-serving Republican in House history, surpassing the tenure of the former speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon of Illinois, who as a teenager had followed the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates and went on to serve 23 House terms in three discontinuous segments between 1873 and 1923. At his death Mr. Young was in his 25th term and 49th year in Congress. (John Dingell, a Democratic House member from Michigan for 59 years, was the longest-serving member of Congress in American history.)

John Clayton, former NFL reporter for ESPN and later for Seattle Sports.

“John was a pioneer as an NFL insider but also one of the kindest men you could ever work with,” said Seth Markman, vice president and executive producer at ESPN. “He literally never said no to a show that asked him to come on — from 6 a.m. to midnight, if you asked for the Professor, he was there for you. I’ll also personally remember how he loved and cared for his beloved wife Pat as she has battled multiple sclerosis. We will all miss John greatly.”
Clayton received the profession’s highest honor, now known as the Bill Nunn Memorial Award, in 2007. The award is presented annually by the Pro Football Writers of America in recognition of “long and distinguished reporting in the field of pro football.”
“It’s the highest honor any writer covering this sport can receive,” Clayton said at the time.

(Hattip to Lawrence for the Don Young and John Clayton tips.)

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 18, 2022.

March 18th, 2022

Akira Takarada.

He was “Hideto Ogata” in the 1954 “Godzilla”. (He also appeared in the 1956 American version.)

From there, Takarada went on to star in a slew of flicks featuring the King of the Monsters, including “Mothra vs Godzilla” (1964), “Godzilla vs Mothra” (1992). The actor’s last appearance in a Godzilla flick was in “Godzilla: Final Wars” (2004), although he filmed scenes for the 2014 US reboot “Godzilla,” which unfortunately didn’t make the final cut. However, he is still featured in the movie’s credits.

Dr. Eugene N. Parker. I actually saw this reported a couple of days ago, but didn’t have a good source for it.

Dr. Parker predicted the existence of the solar wind.

When Dr. Parker published his prediction in 1958, almost no one believed him, including the reviewers of his paper and the editor of The Astrophysical Journal that published it.
“The prevailing view among some people was that space was absolutely clean, nothing in it, total vacuum,” Dr. Parker told The New York Times in 2018.
In response to the reviewers’ negative comments, he appealed to the journal’s editor, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who was also an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. Dr. Parker argued that the reviewers had not pointed out any errors in his calculations, which described how the particles flowed from the sun like water spreading outward from a circular fountain.
“He went where the equations led him,” said Michael S. Turner, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles who was a longtime colleague of Dr. Parker’s at Chicago. “And they led him to some very interesting phenomena that people hadn’t discovered.”
Dr. Parker, he said, was happy when people pointed out a mistake in his calculations but not pleased when people accepted prevalent scientific assumptions without question.
“He had little patience for ‘It’s well known that …’” Dr. Turner said.

“He went where the equations led him,” “He had little patience for ‘It’s well known that …’”. That’s science, right there. (Also, mad props to the late Dr. Chandrasekhar.)

Even though Dr. Chandrasekhar, a future Nobel laureate, disagreed with Dr. Parker’s conclusions, he overruled the reviewers, and the paper was published.
Four years later, Dr. Parker was vindicated when Mariner 2, a NASA spacecraft en route to Venus, observed energetic particles streaming through interplanetary space — exactly what he had predicted.

In 2017, NASA renamed “Solar Probe Plus” after Dr. Parker.

NASA had never before named a spacecraft after a living person. But Dr. Zurbuchen, who had met Dr. Parker years earlier, said he did not have much trouble getting Robert Lightfoot, the acting administrator of NASA at the time, to approve the change in 2017. Dr. Zurbuchen then called Dr. Parker to ask if that would be all right with him. “He said, ‘Absolutely. It will be my honor,’” Dr. Zurbuchen recalled.
Dr. Parker later said he was surprised that NASA had asked for his permission.
A few months afterward, Dr. Parker went to visit the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, where the spacecraft was built and tested. Dr. Fox, then project scientist for the mission, recalled saying, “Parker, meet Parker.”

…

“Parker was always understated,” said Dr. Zurbuchen, who was watching the liftoff near Dr. Parker that morning. “I only saw him cry twice. The first time, when he pulled up to the rocket and his name was on it, and after that launch, when it really got to him — the magnitude of what was happening.”
Months later, Dr. Fox traveled to Chicago to share some of the early data from the Parker probe with Dr. Parker. “His eyes literally lit up,” said Dr. Fox, who showed Dr. Parker photographs not of the sun itself but of dim particles to the side of the sun — the solar wind.
Dr. Fox arranged to send him preprints of papers that mission scientists were writing about the findings. “He read them and he sent notes on them,” she said. “He was just really, really excited about a mission that was really going to do all the science that he always wanted to do.”

Dr. Parker was 94.

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Obit watch: March 17, 2022.

March 17th, 2022

Peter Bowles, British actor.

Other than “To the Manor Born”, he was “Guthrie Featherstone” on “Rumpole of the Bailey”, and did guest shots on “Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased)”, “Tales of the Unexpected”, “I, Claudius”, “Space: 1999”, “The Prisoner”, and appeared four times on “The Avengers”, among other credits.

When I published yesterday’s obit watch, Tyler James was the only person confirmed dead in the Andrews County car crash. Since then, the names of the others have been published:

Mauricio Sanchez
Travis Garcia
Jackson Zinn
Karisa Raines
Laci Stone
Tiago Sousa
Henrich Siemans (driver of the pickup truck)

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 16, 2022.

March 16th, 2022

Sharon Lee Gallegos. She was 4.

On July 21, 1960, she was abducted from the backyard of her grandmother’s home in Alamogordo, New Mexico. A body was found about 10 days later: but, at the time, law enforcement did not believe the body belonged to Ms. Gallegos.

The body had remained unidentified, and known as “Little Miss Nobody” since that time. Yesterday, the local sheriff’s office announced that they had established through DNA testing that it was actually the body of Ms. Gallegos.

Tyler James, golf coach at the University of the Southwest. Sometimes there’s just nothing you can say.

Posted in Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Beware the Ides of March.

March 15th, 2022

(Hattip: Mike the Musicologist.)

Posted in Bagatelle | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 15, 2022.

March 15th, 2022

Scott Hall, professional wrestler. THR.

Very good at being very evil in the ring, Hall won the WWE Intercontinental title four times and WCW Tag Team championships seven times (as “The Outsiders” with Nash), and in 1994 at WrestleMania X at Madison Square Garden, he competed in an iconic ladder match against Shawn Michaels. However, he never won the world title.
During his 26 years as a wrestler, he also feuded with the likes of Sting, Lex Luger, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Ric Flair and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin.
After his retirement in 2010, Hall was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, first in 2014 as bad guy Razor Ramon (resplendent with gold chains, slicked-back hair and toothpick in mouth in an homage to Al Pacino’s Scarface character) and then in 2020 as a member of the villainous stable the New World Order (nWo).

…

Hall would wrestle in more than 1,500 matches across multiple organizations that also included the American Wrestling Alliance (1985-89), New Japan Wrestling (1990) and Total Nonstop Action (2002-08, 2010).

Posted in Obits | 1 Comment »

Hail Columbia!

March 15th, 2022

Frank Martin out as basketball coach at the University of South Carolina.

Hired in 2012, Martin, 55, compiled a 171-147 (79-99 SEC) career record with the Gamecocks. The win total is the third most in program history, and his tenure was highlighted by the program’s only Final Four in 2017.

The team was 18-13 this season.

Posted in Firings, Sports | 1 Comment »

Happy Pi Day!

March 14th, 2022

This is the third year I haven’t been able to celebrate as I’d like to. Perhaps next year.

But in the meantime, please enjoy the day responsibly.

Posted in Geek | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: March 14, 2022.

March 14th, 2022

William Hurt. THR. Variety.

Tova Borgnine, Ernest Borgnine’s fifth wife and cosmetics magnate.

Lawrence sent over a nice obit for Anne Beaumanoir. She spent a long time as

…director of the department of clinical neurophysiology and epileptology at the Geneva University Hospitals. She became noted for many papers on epilepsy and its treatment. In retirement, she lived between homes near her birthplace in Brittany and in the Drôme area of southern France.

Before that, she was part of the Algerian resistance.

Practicing as a neurophysiologist in the southern French city of Marseille in the 1950s, she became a porteur de valise, a suitcase carrier, as well as a chauffeur for the Algerian resistance members inside France as part of what became known as the Jeanson network, which was also supported by intellectuals including the writer/philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Convicted in Marseille for 10 years in 1959, she was released into house arrest the following year because she was pregnant, escaped and found her way across the Mediterranean — first to Tunisia and later to Algeria. After France conceded independence to Algeria in 1962, she worked for the ministry of health under that country’s first independence president Ahmed Ben Bella and was granted Algerian citizenship. (Dr. Beaumanoir remains revered in Algeria for her supportive role, as a Frenchwoman, in the fight for independence.)

Before that, she was part of the French resistance.

In early 1944, Dr. Beaumanoir helped save two French teenagers of Polish origin whose father, Ruben Lisoprawski, ran a bakery in Paris. Like most of his family, he had been taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland and never seen again. But his children Daniel Lisoprawski, 14, and Simone, 16, survived in part because Dr. Beaumanoir learned that the Gestapo was planning a raid on a Paris apartment where the teens were being hidden by a Frenchwoman.
Dr. Beaumanoir went to the apartment to warn them and take the teens to a resistance safe house. That house was also soon raided by German soldiers, but a resistance leader managed to flee with the children over the rooftops of Paris to another safe place.
Eventually, Dr. Beaumanoir spirited them to her parents’ restaurant and home in Dinan, Brittany, where they remained hidden, moving among friendly locations during German house-to-house searches, until the end of the war in 1945. Afterward, the Beaumanoir family brought them up as if their own children.
In 1996, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, named Dr. Beaumanoir as well as her parents among the Righteous Among the Nations, a designation for non-Jews who rescued Jews, for their role in helping the Lisoprawski family.

Posted in History, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

March 13th, 2022

Been a busy weekend, both for me and for sports firings.

Will Wade out as men’s baskeball coach at LSU. Five seasons, 108-54 overall. But: the NCAA has informed LSU that they are investigating a total of 11 violations, including eight “level 1” violations.

Additionally, LSU basketball shares fault with the football program in an additional Level I allegation that LSU “failed to exercise institutional control and monitor the conduct and administration of its football and men’s basketball programs” from February 2012 through June 2020.

…

Wade was suspended at the tail end of the 2018-19 season after Yahoo Sports detailed a wiretapped conversation between him and now-convicted middleman Christian Dawkins. The conversation recorded by the FBI included Wade openly speaking about a “strong-ass offer” he made in the recruitment of former LSU guard and Baton Rouge native Javonte Smart in 2017.
This specific allegation is outlined in the NOA as the first of the seven charges against the men’s basketball team, and was determined to be a Level I violation. In the charge, the Complex Case Unit wrote in this instance Wade “violated the principles of ethical conduct and/or offered impermissible recruiting inducements in the form of cash payments and job offers in order to secure” an unnamed recruit, who is believed to be Smart.

Nino Giarratano out as baseball coach at the University of San Francisco. This is tied to a lawsuit by three former players accusing him of “persistent psychological abuse and repeated inappropriate sexual conduct”.

Tom Crean out as basketball coach of the Georgia Bulldogs. This one seems to have actually been a performance thing: he was 47-75 over four seasons, and they finished 6-26 this year.

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Obit watch: March 12, 2022.

March 12th, 2022

Dr. Donald Pinkel, big damn hero, has passed away at 95.

About 23 years ago, I was watching some sort of special on PBS. I don’t remember the title, but as I recall, they were talking about developments during the 20th century. One of the things they spent a lot of time on was the story of childhood leukemia.

Acute lymphocytic leukemia, a type of cancer that overwhelms the body with misshapen white blood cells, was once the No. 1 killer of children in the United States between the ages of 3 and 15, causing about 2,000 deaths a year. It had a 96 percent fatality rate — and doctors say that number might have been low, because the remaining 4 percent of cases were probably misdiagnoses.

There were drugs that could push leukemia into temporary remission. Emphasis on the “temporary”. It always came back.

Dr. Pinkel combined multiple chemotherapy drugs to drive the disease into remission. Then, when the patients were healthy enough, he and his team bombarded their skulls with radiation and injected drugs directly into their spinal columns, attacking places where Dr. Pinkel suspected the cancer was hiding during remission.
This would go one for months, even years. Children would lose their hair, their appetites. Some died. But by 1968 Dr. Pinkel’s regimen, which he called Total Therapy, was achieving remarkable results: Out of 31 patients in one study, 20 were in complete remission after three and a half years.
A decade later, after continued refinements to the protocol, the five-year survival rate was up to 80 percent. Today, still using Dr. Pinkel’s framework, it is 94 percent.

I realize we’re talking 60 years of scientific advancement here. But to me, this is still an amazing story. Turning things around from “everybody dies” to (almost) “everybody lives”. And going from zero to 80% in sixteen years?

Beyond that, Dr. Pinkel also helped build St. Jude.

One day in 1961 Dr. Pinkel got a call asking if he would be interested in a job as the head of St. Jude. During a period of emotional and professional distress, Mr. Thomas, the hospital’s founder, had prayed to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, for help. When he recovered, he decided to build a hospital to help children in similarly dire straits.
Dr. Pinkel was tired of the cold, wet Buffalo winters, but he wasn’t sure about the offer: Memphis was a segregated Southern city, and many in the medical community said Mr. Thomas’s status as a television comedian made it hard to take the idea seriously.
Still, he met with several members of the hospital board and came away impressed. They, like him, believed in focusing their efforts on childhood cancer, and they agreed that the hospital should be need-blind, and that both its staff and its patient population should be completely desegregated.
Dr. Pinkel drove to Memphis in his Volkswagen Beetle, arriving to find a hole in the ground where the hospital would one day be. He made himself an integral part of the planning process, insisting, among other things, that the hospital have integrated bathrooms.
He also insisted on as much common space as possible, including a single cafeteria for all —- doctors, scientists and administrators — to encourage creative cross-pollination. He also opened the cafeteria to patients and their families, to give staff members a visual reminder of their collective mission.
“It was a civil rights culture,” Jackie Dulle, one of his first executive assistants, said in a phone interview. “He wanted everyone to be equal.”

…

Dr. Pinkel and his team found early success with his Total Therapy approach but kept the results unpublished until the late 1960s, to ensure that the data was solid. Still, when he did publicize his findings, he was met with skepticism, even derision; other doctors said he was cruel to give patients and their families hope in the face of what everyone knew was an incurable disease.
But after he invited a few of his most prominent critics to visit the hospital, they changed their tune; one of them, Alvin Mauer of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, took over as the president of St. Jude when Dr. Pinkel left.

…

He won most of the major awards given in the medical field. In 2017 St. Jude named its new research tower after him, a testament to his persistence in the face of what everyone else said was an impossible task.

Posted in Obits, Science | 1 Comment »

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