Another quote for your pleasure:
I don’t have room for this elsewhere, so: my thanks to SP RN and Bones. I finished Metzger’s Dog over the weekend, and their recommendations were right on target.
Miscellany.
September 29th, 2025Your loser update: September 29, 2025.
September 29th, 2025The NFL portion of the loser update has to wait until tomorrow. The 0-3 Jets play the 0-3 Dolphins tonight. I’m sure this will be an exciting game, if you’re a big fan of fiascos.
The major league baseball regular season ended yesterday, though.
It delights me to be able to report that Cleveland clinched their division (AL Central) and Detroit clinched a playoff berth (also in the AL Central). I will be happy if either team goes to the big show.
But I know that’s not what you are wondering about.
The White Sox finshed 60-102, for a .370 winning percentage. That’s bad, but it doesn’t even make Wikipedia’s list for the modern era.
And the Rockies? Well, I was half right. They did get swept by Seattle (who won their division: the AL West).
But they also got swept by San Francisco. I had figured they’d win one game in SF, but they managed to put together a six game losing streak.
Their final record? 43-119, for a .265 winning percentage. So, so close to a record.
As it is, they are fourth on the Wikipedia list for losses (tied with the 2003 Tigers, and ahead of the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics). If you sort by winning percentage, they come in eighth, tied again with the 2003 Tigers and just ahead of the 1952 Pittsburgh Pirates. (For the record, the 2024 White Sox were .253, for fifth place on the list. The modern era record for worst winning percentage is still the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics, at .235 over 153 games.)
Quotes.
September 27th, 2025A few quotes I’ve run across recently that amused me:
…“Michael, anybody that eats chocolate cake alone is an a–hole.”
“You ain’t gotta get real technical to dish out death sometimes.”
By way of Mike the Musicologist. He didn’t provide me with a link, but the context is a woman commenting on how hard it is to carry concealed while wearing a dress:
Edited to add: Link added.
Crime watch.
September 26th, 2025I’m going to make this short, because it broke at the end of the day today and there’s more to come.
The Austin Police Department says that they have identified a suspect as the Yogurt Shop Killer.
Police identified the suspect through DNA and ballistics testing.
…
APD says they plan to hold a press conference on Monday to provide more information, so I’ll probably wait until Monday night to do a longer write-up. But I wanted to get at least this out now.
The identified suspect killed himself in 1999.
Obit watch: September 25, 2025.
September 25th, 2025Sara Jane Moore. She was 95, which surprised me: I had been under the impression she was much younger.
You remember Ms. Moore, don’t you?
In San Francisco, about 3,000 people were gathered near Union Square for a glimpse of the president [Gerald Ford – DB] as he left the St. Francis Hotel. Ms. Moore, 45, who had been questioned by Secret Service agents the day before but then released, was standing across the street, 40 to 50 feet away from the commander in chief. She drew a chrome-plated .38-caliber revolver and fired at the president. The shot missed, and she raised the gun for a second shot.
Oliver W. Sipple, a former Marine, deflected the gun just as she fired. The bullet narrowly missed the president, ricocheted off a wall and grazed a bystander. Pandemonium erupted as Mr. Ford, unhurt, was hustled into a limousine by Secret Service agents and sped away. Mr. Sipple and two police officers seized Ms. Moore.
The attempt took place on September 22, 1975. Ms. Moore died on September 24th, 2025, so almost exactly 50 years later.
In February 1979, Ms. Moore and another female inmate escaped from a minimal-security federal prison camp in West Virginia by scaling a 12-foot fence, but they were recaptured hours later. During her imprisonment, she converted from Christianity to Judaism in 1986, explaining to Ms. Spieler that she wanted kosher food for better-quality prison meals. She was paroled from a federal prison in Dublin, Calif., on Dec. 31, 2007, a year after Mr. Ford died at 93.
Ms. Moore moved under an assumed name to an unidentified town on the East Coast and only rarely gave interviews. But she did speak to Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” show in 2009.
“It was a time people don’t remember,” Ms. Moore told Mr. Lauer, citing the Vietnam War, a politically divided nation, her own radical beliefs and her attempt to kill the president. “We were saying the country needed to change. The only way it was going to change was a violent revolution. I genuinely thought that this might trigger that new revolution in this country.”
Some things never change.
This is for Mike the Musicologist:
…
Just in case you were wondering, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme is still alive. She’s only 76.
Henry Jaglom, indie director. I’d heard of him, but have never seen one of his movies.
He acknowledged that his movies tended to be either loved or hated. Many critics found his work rambling and navel-gazing. As the British newspaper The Guardian noted in 1991, his films have been described as “cinema as personal therapy,” “psychobabble” and “diaries as art.”
“It’s fortunate I’m so arrogant,” Mr. Jaglom told The Guardian. “I don’t mind bad reviews. I used to send the worst ones to people as Christmas presents.”
Obit watch: September 24, 2025.
September 24th, 2025Claudia Cardinale. NYT (archived). IMDB.
The only Claudia Cardinale movie I’ve seen is “Lost Command” (though both “8 1/2” and “Fitzcarraldo” are on our list: “Son of the Pink Panther” is not). She was on a lot of lists of “the most beautiful women in the world”.
Bernie Parent, goalie.
…
Parent was unprepared for life after hockey. He fell into a depression. He drank too much and got help through Alcoholics Anonymous to become sober. He coached another Flyers goalie, Pelle Lindbergh, who won the Vezina Trophy in 1985. (Later that year, Lindbergh, 26, died of injuries from a car accident.)
“When death defeats greatness, we all mourn,” Parent said at a memorial service for Lindbergh at the Spectrum, the Flyers’ home arena at the time. “And when death defeats youth, we mourn even more.”
Parent worked for many years as a team ambassador for the Flyers, as a spokesman for an insurance company and as a motivational speaker. He also helped other recovering alcoholics.
I’m Gundy, damn it!
September 23rd, 2025I guess this counts as a “big” firing, or at least a larger one:
Mike Gundy out at Oklahoma State.
Gundy, 58, is the winningest coach in program history with a record of 170-90 over his 20-plus seasons, accounting for 26.6% of the school’s all-time victories.
No single figure has had as much direct impact over such a significant amount of time as Gundy, who has spent 35 of the past 40 seasons at Oklahoma State in some form.
But this is kind of a “what have you done for me lately” thing. Especially if you define “lately” as “since 2021”.
The 2021 squad came inches short of defeating Baylor and potentially earning a College Football Playoff bid…
But since that moment, OSU has gone 21-21, despite a 10-4 season in 2023 that included another appearance in the Big 12 title game.
The 2024 team went 0-9 in conference play, and the 1-2 start with a 66-point loss to Oregon and a 19-12 loss to Tulsa spelled the end for Gundy, concluding his career with a record of 170-90 (.654 winning percentage), and 12-6 in bowl games.
Noted:
Screenshot
Not quite the war font, but fairly close.
Edited to add: ESPN, for those who want supplemental coverage.
Firings watch.
September 23rd, 2025I figure that there’s going to be some kind of big firing this week. So far, I haven’t seen any, but there’s been a few small firings.
Sandy Brondello out as coach of the New York Liberty, although this is being presented as non-renewal of her contract. The Liberty won the WNBA championship last year, but were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs this year.
Ms. Brondello was 107-53 in four seasons.
Ike Hilliard out as wide receivers coach for the Atlanta Falcons.
Car bomb explodes in Beirut.
September 22nd, 2025Lawrence and I have a running joke about overused headlines:
“Car Bomb Explodes In Beirut”.
“Rosie O’Donnell Goes On Unhinged Rant”
And, to that list, we can add:
“The Broadway Musical Is in Trouble”.
None of the 18 commercial musicals that opened on Broadway last season have made a profit yet. Some still could, but several have been spectacular flameouts. The new musicals “Tammy Faye,” “Boop!” and “Smash” each cost at least $20 million to bring to the stage, and each was gone less than four months after opening. All three lost their entire investments.
Lavish revivals of much-loved classics are also fizzling. On Sunday, a revival of “Cabaret,” budgeted for up to $26 million and featuring a costly conversion of a Broadway theater into a nightclub-like setting, threw in the towel at a total loss. A $19.5 million revival of “Gypsy” that starred Audra McDonald and earned strong reviews closed last month without recouping its investment. Even a buzzy production of “Sunset Boulevard,” which won this year’s Tony for best musical revival, failed to make back the $15 million it cost to mount.
…
So “Suffs” didn’t make money? Interesting to know.
But wait!
Why was this money not going to the Montana State University Angling Oral History Project? Or the USCSB?
…
…
I wish him all the luck in the world, but this sounds like “Hollywood accounting”, and I don’t think any of the suits around that have had much success.
“Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”, the musical? Maybe the problem is that Broadway is out of ideas.
And haven’t people been saying “The Broadway Musical Is in Trouble” since…1942?
Obit watch: September 22, 2025.
September 22nd, 2025Playing catch-up from the last few days:
Marilyn Hagerty. If you’ve been around the Internet for a while, that name may ring a bell with you.
Ms. Hagerty wrote a restaurant review column (“The Eatbeat”) for the Grand Forks (North Dakota) Herald. In 2012, she wrote a review of the new (and first) Olive Garden in Grand Forks. It went viral on the Internet.
When the article first began to ricochet across social media, the initial consensus was that the writer was a kindly Midwestern grandmother who had lost the script. This seemed to be the view of an out-of-town reader who sent her a one-word email: “Pathetic.”
In fact, Ms. Hagerty was following a script of her own. It was her long-running custom to provide factual rundowns of the dining options in Grand Forks, a college town near the Minnesota border that has fewer than 60,000 people and few restaurants intent on culinary innovation.
She covered truck stops, diners and fast-food joints, some of them more than once. Although she wrote about places serving Vietnamese and Somali cuisine in Grand Forks, Eatbeat readers craving a new thrill generally had to look for it in Fargo, about 80 miles to the south.
“If you were going to review the fine dining here, you’d be done in three weeks,” Ms. Hagerty once said of her community.
What she said. It bothered me at the time, and it still bothers me. Why not seriously engage with and critique with what Olive Garden has to offer? (Back when we were still doing regular reviews, the Saturday Dining Conspiracy also reviewed our local Olive Garden, and our logic was the same: why should they be above criticism?)
…
She was 99.
Jim Edgar, Republican governor of Illinois during the 1990s.
Marian Burros, noted food writer. She worked at various times for the Washington Post, Washington Star, and the NYT.
She might offer a recipe for, say, Martha Washington’s Great Cake, usually in the weekly De Gustibus column, which she took over in 1983, while reporting on a sodium labeling bill being debated in Congress or regulatory battles over the wording of federal dietary guidelines.
From her home base in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, she became a close observer of the White House kitchen, reporting on a succession of presidential chefs, inaugural meals and the dining styles of new administrations. She took a particular interest in the White House vegetable garden planted by Michelle Obama.
On the pleasure side of the equation, her plum torte was one of the most popular recipes in the history of The Times, reprinted every September from 1983 to 1989.
“The Story Behind Our Most Requested Recipe Ever” (archived). Recipe (archived).
Martha Washington’s Great Cake (archived).
Your NFL loser update: week 3, 2025.
September 22nd, 2025NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:
NY Jets
Miami
Tennessee
Houston
New York Football Giants
New Orleans
The worthless Bills are 3-0.
The worthless Chargers are 3-0.
Houston is 0-3.
And as soon as I suggest that Cleveland might go 0-17, they go out and win a game.
But we still have the Jets and the New York Football Giants.
In other news, we’re coming down to the final stretch of the baseball season. The Chicago Cubs have clinched a playoff spot. (No, Lawrence, I’m not betting on the Cubs with you.)
What of our favorite teams?
The White Sox are 58-98, for a .372 winning percentage. That projects out to about 102 losses.
And the Rockies are 43-113, for a .276 winning percentage. That projects out to about 117 losses, which is in the historical range. But at this point, they can’t tie the 2024 White Sox record, or even the previous 1962 Mets record of 120 losses. Wikipedia currently puts them between the 1952 Pirates (.273) and the 1909 Senators (.276).
Their final games are in Seattle (who hasn’t quite clinched a playoff sport, but is very close) and in San Francisco (who hasn’t quite been mathematically eliminated, but is very close). If I had to guess, I’d say they’ll get swept by Seattle and win one in San Francisco, for a final record of 44-118. We’ll see if I’m right.
Obit watch: September 18, 2025.
September 18th, 2025Maj. John H. Luckadoo (USAAF – ret.) has passed away. He was 103.
Maj. Luckadoo was a pilot in the 100th Bombardment Group, also known as “the Bloody 100th”.
… even in a campaign that saw extensive losses of planes and crews, it stood out for its deadly turnover: During its 306 missions, the unit lost 757 men and 229 planes.
“Prior to being sent over, our commander called us together and he said, ‘Now I want you to look to your right and you look to your left and look ahead and look behind you, and only one of you is gonna come home,’” he recalled in January to News Channel 9 in Chattanooga, Tenn., his hometown.
…
Mr. Luckadoo’s most harrowing mission came on Oct. 8, 1943, as U.S. forces launched a series of massive air raids over the German port city of Bremen. By then, the life expectancy of a B-17 pilot like Mr. Luckadoo was 11 missions — a virtual death sentence for the officers, who were required to fly 25 missions during their tour.
“Some later described the flak that day as being so thick we could have put down our wheels and taxied on it!” he said in an interview for the 100th Bombardment Group’s historical association.
At one point Mr. Luckadoo looked up to see a flight of German Fw-190 fighters headed straight for them. The lead plane, either by accident or because the pilot was shot, slammed straight into the bomber directly above Mr. Luckadoo’s. Both aircraft exploded, nearly taking down his B-17 with it.
By the time they dropped their payloads, Mr. Luckadoo’s formation had lost 12 of its 18 bombers. An engine had been shot out, and a hole had been punched into a window near his seat. Freezing air poured in. Even with heated sheepskin boots, Mr. Luckadoo’s foot froze to a control pedal.
…
Maj. Luckadoo was the last surviving pilot from the 100th.
Greg Ellifritz has a nice obit up for John Holschen, professional trainer. I recommend you go read it, if for no other reason than the story about the “rocket attack”. I don’t want to quote it here, because I would like for you to go over to Active Response Training and read it yourself.
While you are there, I also recommend you read the related “The Gas Station Clerk”.
By way of the Rap Sheet, I’ve learned that Thomas Perry passed away on Monday.
Mr. Perry is one of those writers who I haven’t read a lot of, but would like to read more. I’m especially interested in his “Butcher’s Boy” trilogy. The only book of his I’ve read so far is Pursuit, which I thought was terrific: the world’s best criminalist goes up against the world’s best hit man.
Ethan Iverson wrote a pretty good essay on Mr. Perry’s work, which I commend to your attention.