Obit watch: March 10, 2025.

March 10th, 2025

It has been a rough few days for baseball.

Frank Saucier, outfielder for the St. Louis Browns. He had a limited career due to injuries and the Korean War. Baseball Reference.

He is perhaps most famous as a historical footnote.

He was the only major league player removed from a game by his manager in favor of a 3-foot-7 circus performer.

Yes, he was the player who got benched in favor of Eddie Gaedel.

Art Schallock, pitcher for the Yankees and Orioles. He was, at the time of his death, the oldest living major league player. Baseball Reference.

Athol Fugard, South African playwright. He’s another one of those folks I’ve heard a lot about, but have no personal experience with his work.

It also hasn’t been a good time for music. D’Wayne Wiggins, of Tony! Toni! Tone!.

Joey Molland, the last surviving member of Badfinger. I feel like this is one of those areas where pigpen51 is better equipped to comment than I am.

Geoff Nicholson, author. I’ve never read any of his books, but the NYT obit makes him sound interesting.

His death, in a hospital, was from chronic myelomonocytic leukemia, his partner, Caroline Gannon, said. It is a rare bone marrow cancer, though, as Mr. Nicholson mordantly observed, “not rare enough, obviously.”

…

Mr. Nicholson was married for a time to Dian Hanson, a former model who edited a fetishist magazine, Leg Show. After living together in New York, the couple moved to Los Angeles when Ms. Hanson became the editor of sex-themed books for the luxury art publisher Taschen. Mr. Nicholson reveled in the 1960s kitsch of his home in a geodesic dome in the Hollywood Hills.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, Sports, Theatre | 1 Comment »

All gun books, all the time!

March 7th, 2025

This time on “What’s Been Added to my Library of Gun Books” recently, a special all gun books edition! No diversions into subjects such as absinthe or old bibles. Just some new and new old gun books. But I am going to include a gun crankery photo.

Since this is going to be gun book heavy, I’m following my usual policy of inserting a jump so the non-book, non-gun, and non-book non-gun people can skip easily to the next post…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Sarcasm, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 5, 2025.

March 5th, 2025

Congressman Sylvester Turner (Dem. – Houston).

Turner took over the seat of the late Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee in January after serving two terms as mayor of Houston from 2016 to 2024. He was born and raised in Acres Homes, Houston, and attended the University of Houston and Harvard Law School.

…

Turner will be remembered for his decades-long service to Houston and its residents. He has represented his community at Houston City Hall and the Texas House of Representatives, notably fighting for the people of Houston’s historically black neighborhoods. Turner represents Texas’ 18th Congressional District, a historically significant seat once held by civil rights icons such as Barbara Jordan, Mickey Leland, Craig Washington and Sheila Jackson Lee.

…

In 2015, Turner was elected the 62nd Mayor of Houston and was re-elected in 2019. Turner forged a path forward for Houston during some of the city’s most turbulent times, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey.

Lawrence.

Edited to add: The NYT did not have a story up when I posted, but they do now. I don’t see any coverage in the WP.

Edited to add 2: WP coverage, but it really doesn’t add anything.

James Harrison, big damn hero.

…Mr. Harrison was one of the most prolific donors in history, extending his arm 1,173 times. He may have also been one of the most important: Scientists used a rare antibody in his plasma to make a medication that helped protect an estimated 2.4 million babies in Australia from possible disease or death, medical experts say.

…

Mr. Harrison’s plasma contained the rare antibody anti-D. Scientists used it to make a medication for pregnant mothers whose immune systems could attack their fetuses’ red blood cells, according to Australian Red Cross Lifeblood.
Anti-D helps protect against problems that can occur when babies and mothers have different blood types, most often if the fetus is “positive” and the mother is “negative,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. (The positive and negative signs are called the Rhesus factor, or Rh factor.)
In such cases, a mother’s immune system might react to the fetus as if it were a foreign threat. That can lead babies to develop a dangerous and potentially fatal condition, hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn, which can cause anemia and jaundice.

…

In Australia, scientists from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne are working to create a synthetic version of the drug using what some have called “James in a Jar,” an antibody that can be made in a lab.
But for now, human donors are essential: The anti-D shots are made with donated plasma, and Mr. Harrison was one of about 200 donors among the 27 million people in Australia, Lifeblood said.
“It wasn’t one big heroic act,” Jemma Falkenmire, a spokeswoman for Lifeblood, said in an interview as she reflected on Mr. Harrison’s 64 years of donations, from 1954 to 2018. “It was just a lifetime of being there and doing these small acts of good bit by bit.”

FiveThirtyEight.

According to the Journal, the entire site is being axed and all 15 of its employees will be handed pink slips.

Selwyn Raab, journalist and author. He did a lot of reporting on the Mafia, and on people who were wrongfully convicted of crimes.

One was George Whitmore Jr., who had been imprisoned for the 1963 murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, roommates in an Upper East Side apartment — “career girls,” as the tabloids called them.
Mr. Raab, working first for the merged newspaper The New York World-Telegram and The Sun and then for NBC News and the New York public television station WNET-TV, uncovered evidence showing that Mr. Whitmore was elsewhere on the day of those murders and had no part in an unrelated attempted rape with which he was also charged.
Mr. Whitmore said that the police had beaten him, and that he had no lawyer during the interrogation. In 1996, his case was cited by the United States Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona, the landmark ruling that upheld a suspect’s right to counsel.
Mr. Raab wrote a book about the case, “Justice in the Back Room,” which became the basis for “Kojak,” the CBS series about a police detective, played by Telly Savalas, which ran for five years in the 1970s. “I’m not a detective,” Mr. Raab said. “I just look for the most reasonable approach to a story.”
He joined The Times in 1974 and worked there for 26 years. Reporting for the paper, he uncovered evidence that helped free Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the middleweight boxer who was imprisoned for 19 years in the 1966 shooting deaths of three people in a bar in Paterson, N.J.
The Carter case was another instance of police coercion and prosecutorial overreach, one that also led to the conviction of another man, John Artis. Mr. Carter, who died in 2014, became something of a folk hero, his cause championed in a 1976 Bob Dylan song, “Hurricane,” and in a 1999 film, “The Hurricane,” in which Mr. Carter was played by Denzel Washington.

Posted in Books, Heroism, Law, Obits, Politics, Texas, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 3, 2025.

March 3rd, 2025

David Johansen, of the New York Dolls. Later on in life, he also performed under the stage name “Buster Poindexter”. THR.

Lee Goldberg has posted nice obits for Joseph Wambaugh and Gene Hackman.

[Wambaugh] told me the secret to his cop novels was taking fellow cops to Ruth’s Chris, buying them a steak and some drinks, and letting them talk…and then just listening to what they had to say. Not so much to the specific stories, but the way they *told* their stories, what were the key details that matter to them, the observations they made, the language they used, how they held their bodies as they spoke… it never failed to inspire him.

Olive Sturgess, actress. “The Raven” is actually a pretty swell movie, less horror and more humor than you’d expect. Other credits include “The Rookies”, “Ironside”, and “Petticoat Junction”. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 28, 2025.

February 28th, 2025

Another day, another damn.

Joseph Wambaugh. THR. I don’t see anything in the LATimes yet.

Mr. Wambaugh hoped to keep both careers, as a cop and a writer, but his celebrity and his frequent appearances on television talk shows made police work untenable. Suspects wanted his autograph or his help getting a film role. People reporting crimes asked that he be the one to investigate. When his longtime detective partner held the squad car door open for him one day in 1974, he knew it was time to go.

The story I’ve heard is that, as a working cop, he went to interview a robbery victim. The guy had blood streaming down his head, and Det. Wambaugh asked him if he could describe the suspect. The victim responded by asking him what George C. Scott was like. He quit shortly after, because he realized his fame was getting in the way of doing his job.

Many critics loved him. “Let us forever dispel the notion that Mr. Wambaugh is only a former cop who happens to write books,” the crime and mystery writer Evan Hunter wrote of “The Glitter Dome” in The New York Times Book Review in 1981. “This would be tantamount to saying that Jack London was first and foremost a sailor. Mr. Wambaugh is, in fact, a writer of genuine power, style, wit and originality, who has chosen to write about the police in particular as a means of expressing his views on society in general.”

…

“I’m very interested in the concept of the sociopath, very interested, because my conscience has bothered me all my life,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “Talk about regrets — I have about 20 every day. I was educated in Catholic schools, and they did that to me. So I have to cope with a conscience all the time. And I’m interested in a creature who has none of that.”

I tell people I read The Blue Knight at a very inappropriate age. Because I try to be family friendly here, I won’t describe the scene I most vividly remember. I got pretty far behind in Wambaugh’s fiction, but I think I’ve read all his non-fiction books. Obviously, The Onion Field had a huge impact on me, but The Blooding and Fire Lover are pretty good, too.

I kind of wish I’d met him.

Yet he was a shy, prickly loner who rarely gave interviews, had few friends aside from police officers, didn’t have a literary agent and even played golf alone. He sprinkled his books with cop scorn for the wealthy, especially for entertainment stars in Beverly Hills. His own Southern California homes were modest mansions in upscale places like Newport Beach, San Diego and Rancho Mirage.

(Is it just me, or does he look a little like Nicholas Cage in those photos from the 1970s?)

Boris Spassky, of Fischer-Spassky fame.

When they played the first match, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Mr. Fischer, with his brash personality, was something of a folk hero in the West. He was widely portrayed as a lone gunslinger boldly taking on the might of the Soviet chess machine, with Mr. Spassky representing the repressive Soviet empire.
The reality could not have been further from the truth. Mr. Fischer was a spoiled 29-year-old man-child, often irascible and difficult. Mr. Spassky, at 35, was urbane, laid back and good-natured, acceding to Mr. Fischer’s many demands leading up to and during the match.
The match almost did not happen. It was supposed to start on July 2, but Mr. Fischer was still in New York, demanding more money for both players. A British promoter, James Slater, added $125,000 to the prize fund, which doubled it to $250,000 (about $1.9 million today), and Mr. Fischer arrived on July 4.
The match was a best-of-24 series, with each win counting as one point, each draw as a half point and each loss as zero. The first player to 12.5 points would be the winner.
In Game 1, on July 11, Mr. Fischer blundered and lost. Afterward, he refused to play Game 2 unless the television cameras recording the match were turned off. When they were not, Mr. Fischer forfeited the game.
The match seemed in doubt, but a compromise was worked out to move the match to a tiny, closed playing area behind the main hall.
Mr. Fischer won Game 3, his first victory ever against Mr. Spassky, and proceeded to steamroll him, winning the match 12.5 to 8.5.
Mr. Spassky’s sportsmanship was on full display in Game 6 of the match, which by then had been moved back into the main hall. When Mr. Fischer won the game, taking the lead for the first time in the match, Mr. Spassky joined with the spectators in standing and applauding his victory.

Pilar Del Rey, actress. Other credits include “Police Story” (which, as you know, Bob, was a Joseph Wambaugh creation), the “Travis McGee” TV movie, “The Forbidden Dance”, the 1960s “Dragnet”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Bird of Prey”, parts 1 and 2, season 8, episodes 20 and 21. She played “Marquesa”.)

Michael Preece, prominent TV director. Other credits include “Stingray”, “B.J. and the Bear”, “Renegade”, “Jake and the Fatman”…

…and, as a script supervisor before being a director, “Mitchell”, “The Getaway”, and “Mannix”. (“Another Final Exit”, season 1, episode 20. “Eight to Five, It’s a Miracle”, season 1, episode 21.)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Chess, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Of making many books there is no end…

February 27th, 2025

It has been a difficult week. I thought it might cheer me up some to catalog more gun books for the library. As the saying goes, “I’ve suffered for my art. Now it’s your turn.”

This time, though, I have one that’s only sort of tangentially a gun book, and one that’s not a gun book at all. I’ll get into the reason for that one later.

Van Halen mode on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books, Cops, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Law, Mixology, O'Connor | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 27, 2025.

February 27th, 2025

Damn.

Gene Hackman. THR 1. THR 2. Tributes. NYT 1. NYT 2. IMDB.

I was a big fan of his when I was younger, even though I wasn’t allowed to watch any of his movies (except when they showed up on television). I still am. He was one of the greats. And I have no idea what his politics were.

Some of the less often cited movies in his body of work that I’d recommend: “The Conversation”, “Prime Cut”, and “The Royal Tenenbaums” (though I think that’s a bit twee). And of course, “Young Frankenstein”.

He also did an episode of “The F.B.I.”, and where is my boxed blu-ray set of that?

Michelle Trachtenberg. THR. Tributes. IMDB.

Never was a “Buffy” fan, but 39 is way too young for anyone to die.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

You’ve gone down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#144 in a series)

February 26th, 2025

Mike the Musicologist asked me if this qualified. Technically, I’m not sure it does, as I usually reserve flaming hyenas for criminal indictments.

But this is noteworthy, and since I suspect criminal indictments are coming…

There was a Democratic primary in Cook County, Illinois, yesterday. (There may have been primaries elsewhere, but I’m not that up on Illinois politics.)

Cook County includes Dolton, home of Mayor Tiffany Henyard.

How did Tiff do?

She lost. Badly.

With 17 of 17 precincts reported and 100% of the vote counted, per the Cook County Clerk website, [Jason] House won the primary with 3,896 votes (87.91%), compared to Henyard’s 536 votes (12.09%).

I think we can call that a landslide. As a matter of fact, I think we could even call that an avalanche.

For those who are unfamiliar with Ms. Henyard…I wish there was one central source for her that wasn’t Wikipedia. She’s served one term as mayor of Dolton, and that term has been chaotic. Fights at council meetings, the town running out of money, allegations of misuse of public funds, and the list goes on and on.

I note that NBC5 Chicago has a “Dolton” tag. And an hour-long documentary about Dolton and Mayor Henyard. This is one of those stories where, just when you think it can’t get any crazier, it does.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 25, 2025.

February 25th, 2025

Clint Hill.

You may not recognize the name, but I think you’ll recognize him from the photos.

He was the Secret Service agent who jumped on the back of the limo when JFK was shot, and kept Mrs. Kennedy from falling out.

Thirteen days after the assassination, in a ceremony attended by Mrs. Kennedy, Mr. Hill received the highest award bestowed by the Treasury Department — the agency that oversaw the Secret Service at the time — for his “extraordinary courage and heroic effort in the face of maximum danger.”

…

When he retired from the Secret Service in 1975, he was the assistant director responsible for all protective forces.
In December 2013, the Secret Service honored him at its James J. Rowley Training Center in Maryland, erecting a bronze plaque next to a street it named Clint Hill Way.
But the accolades and his ascendancy in the agency could not overcome Mr. Hill’s feelings of guilt. He blamed himself for not reacting a split second faster to the sound of gunfire, becoming convinced that he had missed a chance to save President Kennedy’s life. His emotional turmoil resulted in his retirement in 1975 at age 43, at the urging of doctors.

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits | 3 Comments »

Bagatelle (#128).

February 24th, 2025

I shared this with Lawrence on Saturday, and he was amused (in the “WTF?!” sense):

“Georgia man sentenced to 20 years for bombing woman’s home, planting python to eat her daughter”.

In case you were wondering: 20 years. Federal time, so there’s no parole.

(Also on the “WTF?!” front, a very quick review of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”: pretentious navel-gazing crap.)

Posted in Bagatelle, Explosives, Law, Movies, Reptiles, Snakes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 24, 2025.

February 24th, 2025

Joy Reid’s show on MSNBC.

MSNBC’s president suggested Sunday that blindsided staffers of liberal host Joy Reid’s canceled show can apply for other jobs within the progressive network as she confirmed the group of employees would be canned, according to a report.

Just gonna slide in here before Lawrence does…

Lynne Marie Stewart. Other credits include the animated 1995 “The Tick”, “The Running Man”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Son of the Beach”.

Roberta Flack.

“I’ve been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson,” Ms. Flack told The New York Times in 1970. “If everybody said I sounded like one person, I’d worry. But when they say I sound like them all, I know I’ve got my own style.”

Tom Fitzmorris, who was the food guy in New Orleans for many years.

Mr. Fitzmorris had a corny sense of humor, which often involved jokes about the phrase “soup du jour.” (A customer asks what the soup du jour is; the waitress says, “I don’t know. They change it on me every day.”) He also liked to play elaborate April Fool’s pranks. He once made up a new restaurant that he said was opening near Commander’s Palace and described the fictitious competitor with such detailed admiration that Ella Brennan, then an owner of Commander’s Palace, dispatched her daughter, Ti Martin, to investigate.
Ti Martin, now one of the restaurant’s proprietors, remembered him as a particularly harsh critic, not out of meanness but because he wanted things done in a way he perceived as proper. When she ran out of iced tea at a restaurant she had just opened, he went on about it on his show for what she said seemed like an hour.
“But he was right,” she said. “Who runs out of iced tea?”

Posted in Food, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Gun books, not so much gun books, and other tales of recent library additions.

February 21st, 2025

If I make a small push here, I can get the last of the gun books out of the living room. That will leave me with one on the kitchen table (which is there waiting for me to do the combination gun crankery/gun book post) and a few new additions upstairs. (Plus the backlog. We don’t talk about the backlog.)

Some of these books I can cover relatively quickly, so maybe it is worth making that push. All of them are interesting to me, but for varying reasons.

Shall we get on with it?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books, Food, Hoplobibilophilia | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#143 in a series)

February 20th, 2025

There was an interesting report in yesterday’s NYT. Because I want to be more than a Times digest service, I’ve tried to add additional context from the local news.

Hanceville is a city in Cullman County, Alabama. The 2020 census population was 3,217, and the town employs eight police officers.

Five of the police officers, including the chief, were indicted by a grand jury on Wednesday. The grand jury also recommended the complete abolition of the police department, and stated the department is “a threat to public safety”.

So what’s the backstory? It seems that, either due to malice or incompetence, the police department has trouble securing and accounting for evidence.

“One of the most concerning things that we discovered in this process was that Hanceville Police Department’s evidence room was not secure,” said [Cullman DA Champ] Crocker. “Criminal evidence must be secured in order to have that evidence for prosecution and to ensure due process. This evidence room was anything but secure.”
During the news conference, Crocker showed a photo of the evidence room, pointing out a hole in the door and a broom against the wall.
“This is someone who works there, and you can see this individual has this stick in his hand and is pushing it in the door, in the hole to jimmy open the door, and the grand jury watched a lot of videos, this is from security camera footage, showing this evidence room was routinely accessed by individuals who were not authorized to do so, going in and out using the stick through the hole in the wall,” explained Crocker.

One of the people who accessed the evidence room was a 911 dispatcher. He was found dead in his office the same day. “Evidence” was found in his office, and the autopsy showed he overdosed on “fentanyl and other drugs”.

The chief is charged with “two counts of failure to report ethics crime and tampering with evidence.” The other officers are charged with:

* “two counts of computer tampering, two counts of using office for personal gain, tampering with evidence, and two counts of solicitation to commit a controlled substance crime.”
* “two counts of computer tampering, two counts of using office for personal gain, tampering with evidence, and two counts of solicitation to commit a controlled substance crime.”
* “tampering with evidence.”
* “four counts of unlawful distribution of controlled substance and two counts conspiracy to unlawfully distribute a controlled substance.” That officer’s wife (who is not employed by the department) is also charged with “two counts of unlawful distribution of a controlled substance and two counts conspiracy to unlawfully distribute a controlled substance.”

It sounds like the officer and his wife had a thing going where they were supplying anabolic steroids to two of the other indicted officers. One of the officers used his department issued cell phone to get steroids from those two, and went to the hospital while on duty to get steroid shots from Mrs. Indicted Officer. He also allegedly misused law enforcement databases to get information on two “Does”. Another one of the officers illegally accessed law enforcement databases to get information on a murder investigation, and also got steroid shots from Mrs. Indicted Officer while on duty.

NYT coverage (by way of archive.is).

Coverage from AL.com.

Posted in Cops, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Audit time!

February 19th, 2025

There’s an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which is what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce stories about the same idea. It’s called steam-engine time because nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to do it.

Audit time is like steam engine time, except more boring to watch from the outside, and more interesting from the inside. Especially when you get what the late Neptunus Lex referred to as “short but exciting” conversations.

Getting around to the point, though, two smart people have written smart things about audits and auditing.

LawDog:

While most people think of “audit” in the financial sense, there are actually about nine different kinds of audit — at least — most of which don’t need the services of an accountant.

Larry Correia:

You do NOT need to be an accountant to be an auditor. Anybody who says this is a total dumb ass with zero grasp of how any of this shit works in real life. The people who make up your audit team are recruited from whatever skill sets are necessary to audit that particular system. I (the accountant) have been on audit teams with IT guys, programmers, lawyers, and even machinists. (why machinists, because I was auditing a factory, and I could count the parts, but I couldn’t tell you if the parts were bullshit or not)

I commend both of these gentlemen to your attention, while I work on pulling together some other things and try to stay warm.

Posted in Clippings | Comments Closed

Short art, damn it! Art! watch.

February 18th, 2025

This is not something I regularly get a chance to cover, especially since 2020. So when it comes up, I can’t help but make note of it.

“‘The Gates’ was a huge art sensation 20 years ago — and it wasn’t the only vision Christo and Jeanne-Claude had for NYC”.

The NYPost article includes concept art for some of their other proposed, but never completed, projects for NYC.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude had an obsession with oil barrels. “They were so easy to stack and you could paint them all these different colors,” said Yavachev. “You could use them almost like pixels.”

Posted in Art, Bagatelle, Christo | Comments Closed

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