Geezers on geezers on geezers. Wheel in the sky keep on turning.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
TMQ Watch: October 9, 2018.
October 10th, 2018Obit watch: October 9, 2018.
October 9th, 2018He played Richard Hickock (opposite Robert Blake’s Perry Smith) in the 1967 adaptation of “In Cold Blood”. He was also in “In the Heat of the Night”.
Mr. Wilson appeared in several dozen more films, including “The Great Gatsby” (1974), “The Right Stuff” (1983), “Dead Man Walking” (1995), “The Last Samurai” (2003) and “Monster” (2003).
He played a cruel dog-owner in three movies based on Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s “Shiloh” novels, and Saint Albert Chmielowski in “Our God’s Brother” (1997), a film adaptation, by the Polish director Krzysztof Zanussiof, of a play written by Pope John Paul II.
Mr. Wilson also had recurring parts on the CBS police procedural “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and Netflix’s science fiction drama “The OA.”
Oddly, it doesn’t seem that he ever did a guest shot on “Mannix”.
Bagatelle (#8)
October 9th, 2018The second most amusing thing I read yesterday:
“less than five seconds”. As a friend of mine put it, that’s “Oops, I clicked on the wrong link. (close)”
(If that’s second, what was the most amusing thing? The MLB RICO story, of course.)
Norts spews.
October 9th, 2018We have our first firing of the NBA season. You know, the NBA season that hasn’t started yet.
Phoenix Suns general manager Ryan McDonough out.
From ESPN:
He drafted the likes of Devin Booker, Josh Jackson, TJ Warren, Alex Len, Dragan Bender and Deandre Ayton. He had some early success, but the Suns are still in the same rebuilding mode that they were in when McDonough was hired. The team went 155-255 during his tenure.
The Suns also had five different coaches under McDonough. Last season, they fired coach Earl Watson three games into the season and named Jay Triano interim coach. In the offseason, they named Igor Kokoskov head coach.
In other news, I missed this story until Popehat tweeted part of it. Ken White’s take on this was more “look at the stupid things clients do”, which surprised me: I’ll touch on the reason why shortly.
Summary: the Los Angeles Dodgers (and other baseball teams) may be in trouble. Legal trouble.
…
…
FanGraphs has an interesting supplemental piece. The part that jumps out at me – and the one that I’m surprised Ken wasn’t all over:
Did the Dodgers do the RICO? I am not a lawyer. But the person who wrote the FanGraphs article is: I think she presents a good argument that, if the Dodgers are found guilty of human trafficking, that’s a “predicate offense” for RICO purposes.
Mail and wire fraud are also predicate crimes. So one count of human trafficking, and one count of wire fraud…to quote FanGraphs:
Admit it: wouldn’t you love to see the Department of Justice seize the Dodgers in asset forfeiture and try to run a baseball team? I know I would: a government run baseball team would make the 1899 Cleveland Spiders look like a model of competence and sanity.
Your loser update: week 5, 2018.
October 8th, 2018The Browns actually won a second game this season. The New York Football Giants are 1-4. And the worthless San Francisco 49ers lost, which is good: but to Arizona, which is bad.
Also: Mike Stoops out as Oklahoma’s defensive coordinator.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
None.
The loser update will return at the start of the NFL season next year. There may possibly be special updates between now and then, but it will definitely be back in 2019 (assuming we all live that long).
Obit watch: October 5, 2018.
October 5th, 2018Mr. Romero was a teenage busboy working in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in June 1968 when [Robert F.] Kennedy, moments after giving a victory speech in the California Democratic primary, came walking through and was shot in the head by an assassin.
Mr. Romero rushed to Kennedy and held him as he lay on the floor mortally wounded. Mr. Romero later said he had struggled to keep the senator’s head from hitting the floor.
Dave Anderson, sportswriter for the NYT.
Quickies.
October 3rd, 2018Our short national nightmare is over:
The Republic of Texas Biker Rally and the Heat Wave car show will go on at the Travis County Exposition Center, but the Travis Central Appraisal District will have to scramble to find another venue for thousands of property tax protest hearings after county commissioners voted Tuesday to continue contract negotiations for the two highly popular events.
After a heated debate, commissioners voted 3-2 Tuesday, with County Judge Sarah Eckhardt and Commissioner Margaret Gómez against, to move toward contracts with the event organizers on renting the Expo Center, leaving the appraisal district out of the mix.
Chimene Onyeri, the guy who shot Judge Kocurek: life in federal prison.
Paul Molitor out as manager of the Minnesota Twins. 78-84 this season and no playoffs.
Your loser update: week 4, 2018.
October 1st, 2018Four weeks into the season, and one team left standing. By comparison, at this time in 2017, there were four 0-4 teams. On the other hand, Cleveland was the only winless team at this point in 2016, and Detroit was the only one left in week four of 2015. So I don’t know, Bob.
Also: TMQ is either going to ignore this story, or be his usual insufferable self this week.
And this amuses me:
I doubt Ryan Fitzpatrick was the problem, and I doubt Jameis Winston is the fix. Then again, I didn’t watch a minute of the game.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Arizona
And it looks like the MLB regular season is (more or less) over, and B’more finished 47-115. By my count, that’s 15th on the all-time list.
Podcasters hate this one weird trick!
October 1st, 2018Or, how to get me to stop listening to your podcast:
The rest of this season of Crimetown will be available exclusively on Spotify.
This is a shame: I liked the first season of Crimetown. I’ve even written about it here previously, since (as you know, Bob) I have an abnormal interest in Rhode Island politics.
But if you can’t put your show into an RSS feed, like “Gimlet Media” did with the first “season” of Crimetown, I’m not interested. I’m not signing up for yet another account, even if I can get a Spotify account for “free” (translation: give up your personal data), just to listen to your damn podcast.
(I would point out that “Gimlet Media” is losing my potential advertising views as well by going this route. But since “Crimetown” season one had some of the worst podcast sponsors there are, since I fast-foward through podcast advertisements whenever I can, and since I make it a policy never to buy any product advertised on a podcast, technically, “Gimlet Media” isn’t losing anything from me.)
(Also: podcasts do not have “seasons”. Stop saying that. If you want to do a block of thematically related episodes and take a break between them, fine: just don’t call it a season. TV shows have “seasons” and they have seasons because they take a break between spring and fall for ratings and demographic reasons. Podcasts are not TV shows and do not have to follow that model. Calling your block of episodes a “season” makes you sound like maroons, as far as I’m concerned.)
TMQ Watch: September 25, 2018.
September 27th, 2018Just not feeling the snark this week. So after the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Obit watch: September 26, 2018.
September 26th, 2018Freddie Dekker-Oversteegen passed away on September 5th, one day before her 93rd birthday.
It was 1940, Germany had invaded the Netherlands, and she and her sister, Truus, who was two years older, had been recruited by the local Dutch resistance commander, in the city of Haarlem.
“Only later did he tell us what we’d actually have to do: Sabotage bridges and railway lines,” Truus Menger-Oversteegen recalled in a 2014 book, “Under Fire: Women and World War II.” “We told him we’d like to do that.”
Then the commander added, “ ‘And learn to shoot — to shoot Nazis,’ ” she said.
“I remember my sister saying, ‘Well, that’s something I’ve never done before!’ ”
The sisters, along with a lapsed law student, Hannie Schaft, became a singular female underground squad, part of a cell of seven, that killed collaborators and occupying troops.
The three staged drive-by shootings from their bicycles; seductively lured German soldiers from bars to nearby woods, where they would execute them; and sheltered fleeing Jews, political dissidents, gay people and others who were being hunted by the invaders.
…
“Yes, I’ve shot a gun myself and I’ve seen them fall,” Freddie Oversteegen told a TV interviewer. “And what is inside us at such a moment? You want to help them get up.”
Still, she justified killing collaborators, who had betrayed her neighbors, and foreign soldiers, who had invaded and occupied her country.
“We had to do it,” she said. “It was a necessary evil.”
Ms. Oversteegen also rebutted criticism that the resistance had provoked German retaliation against innocent civilians.
“What about the six million Jews?” she said. “Weren’t they innocent people? Killing them was no act of reprisal. We were no terrorists. The real act of terror was the kidnapping and execution of innocent people after the resistance acted.”
Hannie Schaft was arrested, tortured, and killed shortly before the end of the war. Truus and Freddie Oversteegen created the National Hannie Schaft Foundation in her memory. Truus Oversteegen died in 2016.
First they came for the gun shows…
September 25th, 2018…and I wasn’t a gun owner, so I didn’t say anything.
(No, wait: actually, I did. Previously.)
Then they came for the ROT Rally and the Heat Wave car show.
Travis County commissioners will vote Tuesday on whether to lease the banquet hall to the Travis County Central Appraisal District instead. The lease would be from May to August, making the banquet hall unavailable for the Republic of Texas biker rally, which would take place in June, and the Heat Wave car show, which is scheduled for July.
Organizers with both events said that not having access to the banquet hall could be a deal-breaker.
…
If commissioners approve the agenda item on the banquet hall lease, “there won’t be a ROT rally in 2019,” Bragg said. “If they decide to postpone the decision, there’s room for negotiation.”
The same goes for Heat Wave, said David MacDonald, the show’s owner.
I don’t have anything against motorcycle people: some of my best (virtual) friends are motorcycle people. And I kind of agree with part of the argument: why give the space to the county (basically moving money from one pocket to the other) instead of letting a profitable event that brings in a host of visitors every year pay to use it?
But as I said several years ago: there are more deaths associated with the ROT Rally every year than were ever associated with the old Saxet gun shows at the Expo Center. The ROT Rally is always something I find vaguely obnoxious. Fortunately, most of it is either downtown (which we avoid during ROT Rally) or out at the Expo Center. But you still have roads clotted with bikers, many who seem to have bolted on the loudest exhaust pipes commercially available. That weekend’s usually a mess, and I wouldn’t miss it terribly if it was gone. (I don’t have the same reaction to the car show. That just maybe barely impinges on the fringes of my consciousness. Maybe they could do that in WillCo?)
Your loser update: week 3, 2018.
September 24th, 2018The Browns won for the first time since Donald Trump took office. The worthless Buffalo Bills actually beat Minnesota in what ESPN calls “the biggest NFL upset in 23 years”. The New York Football Giants beat hapless the Houston Texans. New England is 1-2. And we’re down to three teams standing. But at least we didn’t have another tied game.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Houston
Oakland
Arizona
In non-NFL news, the NYT ran an interesting article on the Baltimore Orioles.
I admit I haven’t been paying much attention, because:
1) Baseball.
II) FiveThirtyEight, as of today, is predicting that Baltimore will finish 47-115, or a .290 winning percentage. That’s 15th place on Wikipedia’s list. Historically bad? Maybe. That’s certainly a worse record than the bad Astros teams of recent memory, but it’s still better than the 2003 Detroit Tigers.
I report, you decide.
Obit watch: September 23, 2018.
September 23rd, 2018Over the weekend, I was rewatching parts of “Project Grizzly” and I got to wondering what Troy Hurtubise was up to. I’d kind of lost track of him after the whole “Angel Light” thing.
Sadly, and completely unknown to me until yesterday, Mr. Hurtubise passed away in June, as the result of an automobile accident.
This is a damn shame. I’m extremely skeptical of “Angel Light” and “R-Light” (for obvious reasons), but Trojan armor seems like a logical extension of both the Ursus suits and the protective gear worn by bomb squad technicians. Firepaste doesn’t strike me as being too out there, either. I remember reading a book a while back about a famous magician who helped the Allies develop deception tactics during WWII. In his spare time, this guy also invented something that sounds very similar to Firepaste: the intent was that aircrews who anticipated a crash could apply the substance to exposed flesh and ideally get a little more time to flee a burning aircraft.
We extend our belated condolences to his people, and will pour out a 40 of something Canadian in his memory.
Anne Russ Federman, the last of the three daughters of Joel Russ, founder of Russ & Daughters (formerly Russ’s Cut Rate Appetizers).
I’ve been reading Mark Federman’s book about Russ & Daughters, and I love the story behind the store. I also, as it happens, love me some smoked salmon, and I could go for a little herring, too. Next time I’m in New York City…
Book news.
September 22nd, 2018NYT headline:
After reading the article, the surprising (to me) answer is: yes, I do want some sausage with my novel, and I want to visit Bad Sooden-Allendorf, shop at the Frühauf’s bookstore, and get a couple of rolls to nibble on.
In other book news, I just discovered that Silvertail Books has reprinted Under an English Heaven.
I’m sure I’ve written before about the amazingly prolific Donald Westlake, mystery author and screenwriter. (Fun fact: “Westlake co-wrote the story for the pilot of the ill-fated 1979 TV series Supertrain with teleplay writer Earl W. Wallace; Westlake and Wallace shared “created by” credit.”) If you know anything at all about the mystery genre, you know Westlake.
But as prolific as he was, he only wrote two non-fiction books: a biography of Elizabeth Taylor under one of his pen names, and Under an English Heaven about the Anguillan “revolution” and “occupation” of the island by British troops. Rumor has it that this is a very Westlake-ian book, even if it is non fiction: more Dortmunder in tone than Parker. This is one I’m actually excited about: review (possibly) forthcoming.