You’ve still got time to go out and buy a gun for Buy a Gun Day.
Online orders count.
Just sayin’.
Happy BAG Day!
April 15th, 2025Obit watch: April 14, 2025.
April 14th, 2025Mr. Vargas Llosa was never fully enamored, however, by his contemporaries’ magical realism. And he was disillusioned with Fidel Castro’s persecution of dissidents in Cuba, breaking from the leftist ideology that held sway for decades over many writers in Latin America.
He charted his own path as a conservative, often divisive political thinker and as a novelist who transformed episodes from his personal life into books that reverberated far beyond the borders of his native country.
His dabbling in politics ultimately led to a run for the presidency in 1990. That race allowed him to champion the free-market causes he espoused, including the privatization of state enterprises and reducing inflation through government spending cuts and layoffs of the bloated civil service.
He led polls for much of the race, but was roundly defeated by Alberto Fujimori, then a little-known agronomist of Japanese descent who later adopted many of Mr. Vargas Llosa’s policies.
Jean Marsh, actress. NYT. Other credits include the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “The Eagle Has Landed”, and “See China and Die”.
Sun Sweat.
April 14th, 2025The Suns are sweating.
As much as I prefer to quote local news sources, I can’t pass up the way the Post put it:
AZCentral:
The Suns closed a disappointing 36-46 season on April 13 at Sacramento that began with championship expectations for the NBA’s first $400 million team with three max players in Devin Booker, Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal. It ended with Phoenix missing the playoffs for the first time since 2019-20.
Booker, Durant and Beal are due a combined $150 million this season.
Budenholzer coached for one season. He took over after Frank Vogel was fired.
Phoenix has been paying Vogel, who signed a five-year, $31-million deal.
Post:
Also fired: David Griffin, executive VP of the Pelicans.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#146 in a series)
April 11th, 2025Oh, New Jersey. Notable for the Joyce Kilmer Service Area…and corruption.
39 people were indicted today for their parts in what’s described as a “sweeping gambling case that was part of a two-year investigation that uncovered illegal operations in Woodland Park, Garfield, and Totowa that netted $3 million in illegal profits, the AG alleged.”
One of those people is George Zappola, who is allegedly a leader in the Lucchese Mafia family. Some other Lucchese captains and soldiers were also indicted.
Also indicted: a councilman from Prospect Park.
More:
On Wednesday, cops raided four illegal poker clubs connected to the Lucchese family, two of which were run out of the backrooms of restaurants. They also searched a business in Paterson that was storing gambling machines and the homes of seven people who were allegedly managing the gambling operation.
The raid led officials to discover more poker clubs and dozens of people who hosted poker games, worked at the clubs, or managed bettors on an illegal online sportsbook on sites outside the US, Platkin said.
…
The websites allowed the mobsters to use the internet and technology to carry out the same criminal activities La Cosa Nostra had been doing the old-fashioned way since the 19th century, Platkin said.
Shah is charged with racketeering, conspiracy to promote gambling and money laundering and other charges for which he could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted on the top charge.
This seems simultaneously small-time and stupid. How much money can there be in the “rake” from poker games? And with the existence of actual real sportsbooks that advertise constantly on television, who uses a Mob sportsbook? People who can’t get an account with a legal one? What percentage of the market is that?
Obit watch: April 11, 2025.
April 11th, 2025I missed this, and it hasn’t been reported in the usual places I check. I only know about it thanks to a story in the Rap Sheet.
Ken Bruen, the great Irish mystery writer, passed away on March 29th.
My late lamented friend Willie Siros (of the late lamented Adventures in Crime and Space) gave me an advance reading copy of The Guards because he thought I might like it. I loved it. It was something new and stunning and frankly brutal, especially the ending. I haven’t gone back to the Jack Taylor books since, though, and I don’t know why, other than not having enough time to read everything. But with a hard stop in place, now I can catch up.
I’ve read A Fifth of Bruen (and I have the promotional Zippo that was issued with it). You can see the Jack Taylor in these early stories, but you can also see more depth to Bruen. For example, one of the stories is a very gentle mainstream story about a couple dealing with the birth of a child with Down syndrome.
Bruen was, to my mind, a good and underappreciated writer, whose death leaves a hole.
Also by way of the Rap Sheet, also among the dead, and also no obit in the usual places: Robert McGinnis, artist. Quoting from his obit:
Not exactly an obit, but this is a swell…tribute? to John Taffin from the Revolver Guy blog.
Firings watch.
April 8th, 2025Michael Malone out as head coach of the Denver Nuggets. Also gone: general manager Calvin Booth.
Malone went 471-327 in ten seasons as coach. There are three games left in the NBA regular season, and Denver is in fourth place in the Western Conference.
More from ESPN, which is spinning Booth’s termination as “not extending his contract” rather than a firing.
BAG Day is coming!
April 8th, 2025We’re a week away from April 15th, National Buy a Gun Day.
Can you feel the excitement? Because I sure can. You’ve got a week to make your BAG Day plans. (And complete your taxes, too.)
Am I buying anything this year? The answer is…probably not. And the reason for that is the best reason in the world: I spent my gun budget in Tulsa this past weekend.
Yes, it’s very nice. I will post photos when I can get to them in the queue.
If I hadn’t blown my gun budget for the next few months, there is something I am really excited about: Smith and Wesson just announced a new lever gun in their 1854 series…
…chambered in .45-70 Government.
Both Mike the Musicologist and I have been looking for guns in .45-70, and the S&W seems to be competitively priced with the newer Marlins. MSRP from S&W is $1399 for the synthetic stock model, and $1499 for the walnut one.
I don’t just say this because I am an unabashed S&W fanboy: the 1854 in .45-70 seems to me to be a genuinely exciting package. I expect it will take a month or so to trickle down the production chain to retail, but I plan to ask my local gun shop on Saturday about getting one.
This one goes out to pigpen51.
April 8th, 2025We run a full service blog here. And this time, we remembered to stop and get photos on our way out of town.
Even better, the weather on Monday was actually nice, after dealing with cold, rain, and overcast from Wednesday night through Sunday night.
Interestingly (well, to me) the Billy Sims Barbecue we went to on our last trip has moved. The new location replaces a shabu-shabu place that both Mike the Musicologist and I liked. And it looked like whatever went in where the old location was has also closed.
But: they did take the statue with them. There’s a large empty plinth in front of the old location, though. I’m not sure what you can do with an empty plinth, other than put a replacement statue on it. But given there’s nothing at that location right now…
Travel update.
April 6th, 2025Travel day tomorrow for the return, so probably light blogging unless someone important dies or something major happens.
In the meantime, Atlanta won Friday night. There are now no teams that can go 0-162, but the Braves are 1-8, for a .111 winning percentage. Projecting that out over the season, it comes out to 136 losses.
Our trip has been successful, but we did end our day early. Not so much out of exhaustion (at least for me) but because people started packing up around noon. While we didn’t see everything, we came closer than we did last year and probably could have seen it all, except by 2:15 PM diminishing returns had set in: there were so many empty tables and so many people packing and leaving that we decided it wasn’t worth it to explore the rest of the unexplored country.
While I don’t like discussing other people’s purchases, I will say that our VRBO could also now be known as the Winchester Mystery House. I will also say, at some point, folks will see the return of another one of this blog’s peculiar obsessions.
Your loser update: April 4, 2025.
April 4th, 2025Still on the road, but have time to get in a quick one.
MLB teams that still have a chance to go 0-162:
Atlanta Braves
Atlanta, which I’ve always thought to be a generally good team, is 0-7 right now. But it looks like they play the Marlins tonight, and are pretty heavy favorites.
Nothing more than silliness.
April 3rd, 2025
Consumer warning.
April 3rd, 2025When I am out and about, I like to pick up unusual and different snacks for the Saturday Movie Group to try.
I bought some of these a while back and intended to write about them, but it got past me. Then we stopped at the Buc-ee’s in Hillsboro yesterday, where I saw them for sale again and was reminded that I intended to do a post.
“flock Chicken Skin Crisps”, in various flavors, including Terry Black’s Barbecue. Low-carb, high protein.
Folks, these are vile. Do not purchase these if you have any regard for your taste buds.
We opened the pack of Terry Black Barbecue flavor. It is about the size of your typical snack pack of chips. There were three of us there. None of us had more than one. The rest went into the trash. I don’t recall us ever before having a snack that was so bad none of us could finish it, but these were just that horrible.
Terry Black and Buc-ee’s should be ashamed of themselves for selling something this bad to unsuspecting travelers. Avoid at all costs. I wouldn’t even feed them to an elephant. Buy some beaver nuggets instead.
Obit watch: April 3, 2025.
April 3rd, 2025I was busy traveling in elephants yesterday. By the time we got in, got unpacked (do you know how long it takes to unpack an elephant?) and got something to eat…it was late.
So: Val Kilmer, for the historical record. NYT. THR.
Not much to say, really, except that I think both “Heat” and “Tombstone” are pretty good movies. I actually like “Tombstone” better than “My Darling Clementine” (which we watched last week) on the OK Corral movie front.
Charlotte Webb has passed away at 101.
Ms. Webb was one of the last surviving Bletchley Park codebreakers.
Ms. Webb, known as Betty, was 18 when she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army, and was assigned to work at the base in Buckinghamshire where Bletchley Park was located. From 1941 to 1945, she helped in the decryption of German messages, and also worked on Japanese signals.
In 2015, Ms. Webb was appointed as Member of the Order of the British Empire and in 2021 she was awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s most prestigious honor.
Sian Barbara Allen, actress.
Other credits include “Sword of Justice”, “The Rockford Files”, “The F.B.I.”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, and “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Patty Maloney. Other credits include one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Trapper John, M.D.”, and voice work in the 1978 “Lord of the Rings”.
Travel day.
April 2nd, 2025Blogging is going to be as and when time permits, probably through Thursday of next week.
Obit watch: March 30, 2025.
March 30th, 2025Sgt. Joe Harris (United States Army – ret.) has passed away. He was 108, and is believed to have been the oldest surviving paratrooper.
Mr. Harris was a member of the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, nicknamed the Triple Nickles (the word was deliberately misspelled) after their unit designation and the three buffalo nickels that formed their insignia.
He had enlisted in the Army in 1941, and he volunteered to join the 555th soon after it was formed in 1943. The Army was still rigidly segregated, and most Black service members served in support roles; the battalion was designed as an early step toward the military’s eventual desegregation.
It never served overseas. Instead, in 1945 it was transferred from its base in North Carolina to rural Oregon as part of a confidential program known as Operation Firefly.
The Triple Nickles were assigned to parachute in and fight fires started by Japanese balloon bombs.
Mr. Harris and his unit became the front line in fighting the blazes. Jumping from C-47 cargo planes, they wore leather football helmets with wire-mesh face masks and carried a brace of firefighting tools, including the Pulaski, a specialized tool that combines an ax and an adze.
They were trained to aim for trees, to avoid landing in dangerously rugged territory. Among their gear was a 50-foot rope that they would use to drop to the ground after getting snared in branches.
Mr. Harris performed 72 jumps, fighting fires started by the bombs as well as by lightning and other natural causes. He was honorably discharged in late 1945. The Army was desegregated in 1947, and the 555th was incorporated into the 82nd Airborne Division.
Richard Chamberlain. THR. IMDB.
Bruce Glover. Other credits include the 1973 “Walking Tall”, “Bearcats!”, and “The Six Million Dollar Man”.
Richard Norton, “Actor, Martial Arts Expert, Trainer and Stuntman”. Other credits include “Gymkata”, “Walker, Texas Ranger”, and “Road House 2: Last Call”.