Travel day today. Early morning flight, long layover in Denver, so I may have a chance to blog.
If I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight.
Talk amongst yourselves.
I lit out from Reno…
June 11th, 2018Obit watch: June 8, 2018.
June 8th, 2018I don’t remember now what prompted me to pick up Kitchen Confidential, but I’m glad I did: it was a wild, fun, and funny book that I enjoyed immensely. I think at this point I’ve read almost everything Mr. Bourdain wrote that was bound between covers. I wasn’t as up on his TV shows, what with the whole not having cable thing. And I really wanted to meet him sometime when he wasn’t frantically searching for a bathroom in an airport and say thanks.
I had been reading Appetites: A Cookbook right before I left, and I remember him talking about how much he loved his family and friends, and cooking for them. That was pretty much the whole point of the book: cooking well for the people you love. I guess I sort of half-consciously knew that he went through a divorce after that…
There are plenty of people who have lives you think you’d like to live. But you wouldn’t want to live the life they lived inside. https://t.co/eHCUH5eKYy
— NarrowlyDecidedHat (@Popehat) 8 June 2018
Bethany Mandel wrote a good piece for the NYPost the other day about suicide and what it does to the people left behind. I commend it to your attention, especially the last paragraph.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.
Obit watch: June 7, 2018.
June 7th, 2018Jerry Maren, one of the Munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz” and the last surviving little person from that group. (According to the NYT, some young girls were also hired to fill out the Munchkin ranks, and some of them are still alive.)
With a friend and fellow actor, Billy Barty, Mr. Maren in 1957 founded Little People of America, a nonprofit advocacy organization that says it has roughly 6,000 members.
“He took it as his responsibility to show, through a strong sense of self and speaking out and personal example, that little people are just people,” Mr. Cox said. “All of the other Munchkins had a great deal of respect for Jerry.”
Mel Weinberg, of ABSCAM fame.
…
Travel day.
June 6th, 2018Blogging will be catch-as-catch-can, especially since the latest update to the WordPress app on IOS appears to have broken either the app or the connection between the app and my blog.
Talk among yourselves. I’ll start: the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman, nor an Empire. Discuss.
Okay, slightly more seriously: I’m about halfway through Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence and expect to finish it on the plane tomorrow. I’m liking it a lot, though not quite as much as Public Enemies or The Big Rich.
The most striking thing to me: just how many bathrooms the Weathermen blew up. There are parts of the book that are just a litany of “blew up a men’s room”, “blew up a ladies room”, “destroyed a bathroom”, “blew up a bathroom in the Pentagon”. It’s like these people didn’t do anything except blow up bathrooms (and, of course, themselves).
The whole book is a veritable catalog of certified bat guano insanity. And I haven’t even gotten to the part about the guy with one eye and one thumb (he lost the other eye and nine fingers when his homemade bomb detonated prematurely) who escaped from jail by cutting the metal grate out of his window (ever tried using wire cutters with no fingers and one thumb?) and dropping 40 feet…
Obit watch: June 5, 2018.
June 5th, 2018Prominent fashion designer Kate Spade has passed away at 55.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.
Robert Mandan, television actor perhaps most famous as “Chester Tate” on “Soap”.
Barbara Kafka, noted cookbook author. When I was younger, I cooked a lot of meals out of her Microwave Gourmet.
For the record, the paper of same still has not published an obit for Gardner Dozois.
Historical note, suitable for use in schools.
June 4th, 2018Approximately 50 years ago today
LAT retrospective. Steve Lopez column.
In case you were wondering, Sirhan is still alive, still in prison, and his next parole hearing will be in 2021.
I wish I could say more about this: I was barely three at the time.
If you like your revolver, you can keep your revolver.
June 1st, 2018The New York Police Department is getting rid of their revolvers.
“What’s that?” you say. “I thought the NYPD all carried Glocks or SIG with the NY-2 trigger.”
Mostly right you are, Bob, and you’re also a perceptive reader of my blog. But NYPD grandfathered in officers who chose to continue carrying revolvers after the department transitioned to semi-auto pistols in 1993. Yes, there are NYPD officers still on the job, still carrying revolvers, after 25 years.
The paper of record estimates that “about 50 officers” are still carrying revolvers. The department decided in November that everyone would transition to semi-auto pistols by the end of August.
…
But the change has been met with resistance from officers reluctant to set aside the revolvers that they regard as old friends for unfamiliar pistols that have twice the capacity but are susceptible to jamming. Officer Mary Lawrence, a crime prevention officer in the 103rd precinct in Queens, said that was never a concern with the Smith & Wesson revolver that she has used over her 26 years with the department.
“I’m proud of this uniform that I’m wearing and I’m proud of my gun that I carry because it’s been reliable to me,” she said. “I didn’t think that I needed extra firepower at all.”
The Firearm Blog actually covered this when the announcement was made in November, but I’m blogging the NYT story here because I think it’s an interesting piece of “human interest” journalism (hysteria about “increasing gun violence” aside). Especially that photo at the top of the article.
I wish someone could ask Jim Cirillo if he would feel undergunned with his Model 10 today, and if he thinks “gun violence” has increased since the early 1970s. (Also, I hope someone picks up the reprint rights to Guns, Bullets, and Gunfights now that Paladin is out of business.)
Overthinking it.
May 31st, 2018Headline:
Please Don’t Roast Marshmallows Over the Erupting Hawaii Volcano, USGS Warns
At first, this sounds like a bunch of joyless fun suckers sucking all the fun out of life. But USGS’s argument actually makes sense: the H2S and SO2 present around a volcanic eruption would probably make the marshmallows taste bad.
But the idea of using something other than an open campfire to toast marshmallows has a certain appeal. What you want in the ideal toasted marshmallow is for it to be evenly browned, not burned. You’re looking for that perfect Maillard reaction all over the marshmallow. And that’s really hard to get in a campfire context.
So why not use an indirect heat source? Could you use something like a heat lamp or some sort of radiant heater to toast marshmallows, instead of radiated heat from hot molten rocks? Why not? Even better, what if your marshmallow toasting stick had a motor in it? Just some sort of small battery powered one that, when you pushed a button, rotated the marshmallow at a uniform speed over the indirect heat source until it was evenly browned.
I thought I’d check Amazon and…well…I found this, which instantly turned me off the whole idea. I’m not sure why: maybe the whole idea of a dedicated electric S’mores maker just seems antithetical to the whole idea of S’mores.
Maybe part of the appeal of a toasted marshmallow isn’t just the striving for an even Maillard reaction, but also the added flavors of wood smoke and the great outdoors.
Or, maybe, I’m just overthinking it.
(But I strongly encourage at least one of my readers to purchase this and report back on the contents.)
Historical note.
May 31st, 2018Today is the fifth anniversary of the Southwest Inn fire in Houston.
Looking back over the blog, I didn’t write much about it at the time because I was running around a lot. I did touch on it a few years later.
The Houston Fire Department responded to a fire at a restaurant that was connected to the hotel. It blew up into a major conflagration, and while HFD was trying to put out the fire, the roof collapsed.
Four firefighters were killed instantly: Engineer Operator Robert Bebee, Firefighter Robert Garner, Captain Mathew Renaud, and Firefighter Anne Sullivan. HFD Captain William Dowling sustained serious injuries, and passed away in 2017.
Obit watch: May 31, 2018.
May 31st, 2018Josh Greenfeld, writer.
Mr. Greenfeld shared an Oscar nomination with Paul Mazursky for the screenplay of “Harry and Tonto”. (They lost to “Chinatown”. Man, 1974 was a heck of a year.) He also wrote plays, reviews, and features.
But he was most famous for three books about his severely autistic son: A Child Called Noah, A Place for Noah, and A Client Called Noah.
Philly.com obit for Gardner Dozois. The paper of record has not seen fit to publish an obit yet.
Obit watch: May 28, 2018.
May 28th, 2018For the historical record: Alan Bean. NYT. NASA.
I'd like to share the story of a personal interaction I had Alan Bean, Apollo Moon-walker and artist. In 2010, I needed more information about something Alan had seen when he was on the Moon. I was researching how rocket exhaust blows soil and dust during lunar landings. /1
— Dr. Phil Metzger (@DrPhiltill) May 27, 2018
Gardner Dozois, one of the great figures of science fiction, passed away yesterday. Michael Swanwick. Lawrence.
He was a fantastic writer: “Dinner Party”, “A Special Kind of Morning”, “Chains of the Sea”, “The Peacemaker”, “Flash Point”, “Solace”.
He didn’t write as much as I would have liked, because he became an editor. Well, not just an editor, but one of the greatest editors science fiction ever saw. He edited Asimov’s Science Fiction for 20 years, “… winning the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor 15 times in 17 years from 1988 to his retirement from Asimov’s in 2004.” He also edited thirty four volumes of the massive Year’s Best Science Fiction collection: “Stories selected by Gardner Dozois for the annual best-of-year volumes have won, as of December 2015, 44 Hugos, 41 Nebulas, 32 Locus, 10 World Fantasy and 18 Sturgeon Awards.”
He was also a personal friend of mine. I wrote about this a little, a long time ago, and I’m still more than a little raw over Gardner’s death. During the 90s, we spent a lot of time online in the old Delphi system. There was a regular Wednesday night book-ish SF chat. And then Gardner and his life partner Susan Casper and some other folks (not named here for their privacy) and I had a smaller, private chat at 11:59 on Friday night, where we commiserated over each other’s struggles and celebrated our successes. We were all a lot younger then, and could stay up until 2 or 3 AM solving the problems of the world.
Gardner was also a veteran, though he didn’t see combat. I would retell the safety column story here, but I can’t do it justice: maybe someone else can. I will say that one of my enduring memories of Gardner is “…OR YOU WILL DIE!”
The ending of “A Special Kind of Morning” has always resonated with me, ever since I first read it.
So, empathy’s the thing that binds life together, it’s the flame we share against fear. Warmth’s the only answer to the old cold questions.
So I went through life, boy; made mistakes, did a lot of things, got kicked around a lot more, loved a little, and ended up on Kos, waiting for evening.
But night’s a relative thing. It always ends. It does; because even if you’re not around to watch it, the sun always comes up, and someone’ll be there to see.
It’s a fine, beautiful morning.
It’s always a beautiful morning somewhere, even on the day you die.
You’re young—that doesn’t comfort you yet.
But you’ll learn.
It was a beautiful morning yesterday, Gardner.
This is not quite an obit, but seems fitting: in memory of PFC Joshua Fleming.
Obit watch: May 23, 2018.
May 23rd, 2018Philip Roth, noted American novelist.
I wish I had more to say about this, but: I just found out about his death, I’ve never read a Roth novel, and I don’t much like liver.
Clint Walker, actor. He was the star of “Cheyenne”, and appeared in “The Dirty Dozen” (among other credits).
Robert Indiana, visual artist, passed away on Saturday. He was most famous for his rendering of “L-O-V-E”:
I’m not sure I ordinarily would have noted this, but:
More:
He had become increasingly reclusive over the years, and his friends and associates wondered why. Turns out that, on Friday, the day before Mr. Indiana died:
They filed the lawsuit on Friday. Mr. Indiana’s death was announced on Saturday. Very interesting.
Obit watch: May 22, 2018.
May 22nd, 2018Murray Newman, over at Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center, has a nice tribute up to Judge Frank Price, who passed away on Sunday.
Judge Price was not someone I knew, but I wish I had known him: he sounds like a good and genuinely fun guy.
(Oddly enough, I was just refreshing my memory of the “Blood and Money” story Sunday night: I had no idea that Judge Price had died until I saw Mr. Newman’s post yesterday.)
Obit watch: May 21, 2018.
May 21st, 2018NYT obit for Joseph Campanella.
Billy Cannon, running back for the Houston Oilers. Noted here for “compare and contrast” reasons:
HouChron obit by John McClain. Note that this obit discusses his legal troubles in one two sentence paragraph, and that close to the bottom of the article.
NYT obit. Note that this obit basically headlines and leads off with his legal troubles, and devotes the better part of six paragraphs to them and the fallout from his conviction.
Obit watch: May 17, 2018.
May 17th, 2018Joseph Campanella, noted actor. He was in everything: most notably, he was Joe Mannix’s boss at Intertect during the first season of “Mannix”. He was also one of the lawyers in “The Lawyers” portion of “The Bold Ones”, appeared several times on “Mama’s Family”, and…well, if you’ve heard of it, he was on it at some point.
Glenn Branca, avant-garde composer.
Mr. Branca’s compositions often used massed amplified guitars of various kinds — soprano, alto, tenor and bass — to give his sound the same breadth as that of an orchestra.
Many of his works are meant to be performed at high volumes, partly so that the overtones of his amplified guitars would linger and pile up, creating a phantom layer of harmony beyond what the musicians were playing, and partly as a purely tactile element, meant to both envelop and physically shake his listeners.