Edited to add: David “Cloud Atlas” Mitchell on A Wizard of Earthsea.
Obit watch: January 24, 2018.
January 24th, 2018No kidding.
January 23rd, 2018Jason Kidd was fired yesterday as head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks.
In case you were wondering, this is a NBA team.
ESPN says this is the third NBA firing this year. (Memphis and Phoenix were the other two.)
He was 139-152 overall.
Obit watch: January 22, 2018.
January 22nd, 2018Hemmingway and Ruark have a new hunting partner.
Harry Selby passed away on Saturday at the age of 92.
I’ve touched briefly on Selby in the past, but more in the context of Ruark. So please indulge me:
…
Without cellphones or evacuation helicopters, Mr. Selby had to be the doctor, mechanic, chauffeur, gin-rummy-and-drinking partner and universal guide, knowledgeable about mountain ranges, grassy plains, rivers, jungles, hunting laws, migratory patterns, and the Bushmen, Masai, Samburu, Dinka and Zulu tribes. He spoke three dialects of Swahili. And he improvised; if there was no firewood, he burned wildebeest dung.
He was no Gregory Peck, but had an easygoing personality that made for good company in the bush. He coped with emergencies, pulling a client clear of a stampede or a vehicle from a bog, treating snakebites or tracking a wounded lion in a thicket — his most dangerous game. He was left-handed, but his favorite gun was a right-handed .416 Rigby, which can knock down an onrushing bull elephant or Cape buffalo in a thundering instant.
…
For 30 years, Mr. Selby ran company operations in Botswana, and guided hunters and photographers into leased concessions covering thousands of square miles in the Okavango Delta in the north and the vast Kalahari Desert in the south, home of the click-talking Bushmen. He cut tracks and built airfields in the wilderness.
In 1970, he established Botswana’s first lodge and camps for photographic safaris. He hired guides and a large support staff for what became a dominant safari business in Southern Africa. After Ker, Downey and Selby was bought by Safari South in 1978, he remained a director, and even after resigning in 1993 he continued to lead safaris privately until retiring in 2000.
Noted actor Bradford Dillman.
He was “Capt. McKay” in “The Enforcer” and “Captain Briggs” (not to be confused with Hal Holbrook’s “Lt. Briggs” in “Magnum Force”) in “Sudden Impact”. As we all know, Callahan went through captains like CNN goes through Russian conspiracy theories.
And finally, more of local interest: Hisako Tsuchiyama Roberts. Mrs. Roberts and her husband, Thurman, founded the Salt Lick barbecue restaurant in Driftwood, a little outside of Austin.
…
She was 104.
Convenience store news.
January 20th, 2018…
Good, but not good enough. As I’ve said before, there’s no reason for the continued existence of BATFE: let Treasury handle the tax collection part of their mandate (including NFA), and let the FBI handle the criminal investigation part.
Worth noting:
Is there really a compelling reason for the Federal government to spend money from Texas taxpayers to keep people from buying smokes in Virginia and reselling them in New York without paying the $43.50 a carton tax? I know, organized crime: but New York has their own law enforcement agencies, and if they really wanted to shut down organized crime, they could drop the $43.50 a carton tax.
Obit watch: January 20, 2018.
January 20th, 2018Paul Bocuse, one of the great French chefs.
I don’t have my copy of Alice Let’s Eat in front of me, but I remember Trillin quoting Bocuse: “Without butter, without cream, there is no point to cooking.” Bocuse was 91.
Dorothy Malone, Texan and retired actress. She was in Douglas Sirk’s “Written on the Wind” (and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress). She also played Constance McKenzie for four out of five seasons of the “Peyton Place” TV series. (She was written out after season four.)
Stansfield Turner, former CIA director.
Peter Mayle, author. I never read A Year in Provence but from the description it sounds a lot like a French version of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.
Cray Cray.
January 18th, 2018When I was younger, I desperately wanted a desktop Cray.
Moore’s Law and all that (stuff), but this really brings home how much things have changed in (mumble mumble) years:
The CRAY-1 was rated at 160 MIPS (and 5.5 tons) – The Raspberry Pi -C is 2441 MIPS and 42 gms (ie 15 x a CRAY-1 in integer compute speed, and 130,000 times lighter) – A super-duper computer. Erlang was developed on a VAX 11/750 (0.8 MIPS) (3000 times slower than a RP) https://t.co/vM9kqBs3ag
— Joe Armstrong (@joeerl) January 17, 2018
TMQ Watch: January 16, 2018.
January 18th, 2018Yes, we know, we’re way late. It doesn’t have anything to do with something we’ll get to in a moment. It’s just been a matter of it being relatively cold here in the greater Austin metroplex. And like a giant lizard or some other cold-blooded animal, we’ve been curling up and conserving body heat. (We also fell into a time sink Tuesday night reading the archives of Damn Interesting. But that’s another story.)
But the cold spell is starting to break. After the jump, this week’s TMQ. Plus: viewer mail!
Obit watch: January 18, 2018.
January 18th, 2018Dan Gurney, one of the all-time great racing drivers.
…
…alternating with his fellow American driver A. J. Foyt, he won the 24 Hours of LeMans in France in a Ford prototype. It was the first time in that race’s 45-year history that it had been won by an American driver in an American car.
A week after that, Gurney won the Grand Prix of Belgium in a 416-horsepower American Eagle, a car he had designed and built himself. He was the first American in 46 years to win a world championship race in an American car.
Like Steve McQueen…
January 15th, 2018Hand to God, when I mentioned Steve McQueen cosplay yesterday, I had no idea this was a thing.
Remember the Titans?
January 15th, 2018They lost to New England on Saturday.
And head coach Mike Mularkey was fired today.
He was 21-22 overall.
Obit watch: January 14, 2018.
January 14th, 2018Some more from the past couple of days:
Keith Jackson, legendary announcer.
Edgar Ray Killen is burning in Hell.
David Toschi passed away a week ago Saturday. FotB RoadRich mentioned this to me in the middle of the week – he saw it on a low-rent cable channel – but I had a lot of trouble finding a good obit. I couldn’t find the actual obit on SFGate: I was only able to get at an arthive.org version.
Anyway, “David who”? He was a famous San Francisco PD detective. He was one of the lead investigators on the Zodiac killings.
He was removed from the case after revelations that in 1976 he had sent several letters praising his own work to a San Francisco newspaper writer under fake names.
“It was a foolish thing to do,” he acknowledged at the time.
I don’t remember where I picked up this detail (maybe in the archive.org version), but that “newspaper writer” the NYT doesn’t name? Armistead Maupin, who was working as a reporter for the SF Chron at the time.
But that wasn’t the only reason he was semi-famous, at least among us common sewers connoisseurs:
Mr. Toschi was a personality in the police department even before his involvement with the Zodiac case, so much so that Steve McQueen had borrowed from him for the fictional police officer he played in the 1968 movie “Bullitt.”
“They literally were filming in my dad’s office,” Ms. Toschi-Chambers said. “My dad took off his jacket, and Steve McQueen said, ‘What is that?’ And my dad said, ‘That’s my holster.’ And Steve McQueen told the director, ‘I want one of those.’ ”
(I wonder what that holster was: and if it’s out of production, how much do vintage ones go for? There’s a discussion on defensivecarry.com, but I can’t judge how accurate it is.)
(Damn shame. He missed out. And I still haven’t seen “Zodiac”.)
Edited to add: this might lead to a longer post later, but: there are certainly worse hobbies in the world than engaging in Steve McQueen cosplay. Though I will concede that could get expensive quick, especially if you go full “Bullitt” and start looking for a Mustang.
Don’t forget your mittens.
January 12th, 2018Knife porn.
January 11th, 2018Neat profile in the HouChron of Dr. Stephen Pustilnik, who is:
- a forensic pathologist
- an amateur chef, and
- a custom knife maker, who specializes in knives for chefs and forensic pathologists.
…
Pustilnik, after spending years examining human bodies, speaks easily of the particular mechanics of the hands. He measures his customers’ palms and observes where the metacarpophalangeal joints – the hinges at the knuckles – rest on a knife handle.
The goal, he said, is for the chef to focus solely on the food, not the way the knife feels.
“When the hand and the blade come together in an ergonomic way, it’s seamless,” he said. “It’s just the chef executing his vision.”
TMQ Watch: January 9, 2018.
January 10th, 2018We’ve finished the first week of the playoffs. Would you expect TMQ to be longer, shorter, or about the same?
We expected shorter. We got “about the same”: almost 5,200 words by our count. Of which the first 1,600 (nearly 31%) are devoted to one theme, which we can summarize in four words.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#45 in a series)
January 10th, 2018Pamela Harris, a Brooklyn assemblywoman, was indicted yesterday.
Ms. Harris is a “retired New York City correction officer” who took office in 2015. She is, of course, innocent until proven guilty, but it sounds like her fraud was wide-ranging, and the prosecution has plenty of evidence:
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The charges suggest a striking degree of planning and elaborate attempts to cover up illegal actions. Prosecutors said, for example, that Ms. Harris used a forged lease to draw down discretionary funds from the City Council, money that was supposed to be used to rent a studio space for the nonprofit, which seeks to involve children and young adults in the arts. Instead, Ms. Harris diverted the money to her personal checking account. All told, some $35,000 was received in two separate instances using such funds, prosecutors said.
In the Hurricane Sandy scheme, Ms. Harris is accused of creating fake lease agreements and receipts, and forging a landlord’s signature, to receive housing assistance money from FEMA for 14 months after the storm, a ploy that she also used to receive financial assistance to repair her Coney Island home in 2016. And once she became aware of a federal investigation last year, Ms. Harris told potential witnesses to lie to federal agents, the authorities said.
(Hattip to Mike the Musicologist, who pointed out that the NYPost coverage waits until paragraph 21 to mention Ms. Harris’s party affiliation. Say what you will about the NYT, but they got that into paragraph 2.)