I just got back from the doctor and don’t feel much like extended blogging, but I wanted to get this up:
Astros GM Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch fired.
This is in the wake of MLB’s findings on the 2017 Astros cheating scandal (they were using video cameras to steal signs: both men have also been suspended by the commissioner for a year.
More from ESPN:
In addition, the Astros lost their first and second round draft picks in 2020 and 2021, and have been fined FIVE! MILLION! DOLLARS!
Seriously, yesterday afternoon and last night were incredibly hectic. Let’s start at the top and work our way down.
Neil Peart, drummer for Rush.
Okay, that was a cheat. How about this?
Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman.
Georges Duboeuf, wine guy.
Mr. Duboeuf was already a successful Beaujolais merchant in the 1970s when he set out to mass-market the local tradition of making primeur, a quick, joyous wine born of the year’s new grapes.
Many wine regions enjoyed a similar harvest ritual, a festive local practice among friends and colleagues. Beaujolais was an especially enjoyable wine to drink young. It was fresh and easy in a way that, say, young Bordeaux, with tannins that could be unpleasantly astringent, was not.
A thriving local market existed for the young wine. It expanded to the Paris bistros in the 1950s, when distributors began to compete in a race to see who could deliver the first bottles to the capital.
Beginning at 12:01 a.m. on the mid-November day that it became legal to ship the new wine, cartons were loaded onto trucks, and off they went as eager revelers waited. The official release date shifted from year to year, but the authorities eventually settled on the third Thursday of November.
Mr. Duboeuf took this annual race and, through energetic and endless promotion, turned it into much more. He enlisted countless French chefs, restaurants and celebrities to the cause.
A crucial ingredient in the promotion was a dollop of suspense. As the clock struck 12:01, Mr. Duboeuf made sure that cases and cases of the wine were loaded onto trucks, ships and eventually jets for shipment around the world, all duly recorded by cameras. The fact that much of the wine had been shipped in advance was irrelevant to the fun.
“Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé” became an exultant international catchphrase. Television commercials would show the wine being delivered to, by Beaujolais standards, the remotest corners of the earth.
Alasdair Gray, Scottish novelist.
By way of Lawrence, Ken Fuson. Not a particularly famous guy, but this is one of those funny and touching self-written obits.
Harry Hains, actor. (“American Horror Story”, “The OA”.)
Also by way of Lawrence (as was the Harry Haines obit): Shozo Uehara.
Michael Shayne Wolfe, the mayor of Hempstead, Texas, has been officially indicted on one count of “theft of service by a public servant”.
(Previously.)
They are talking like we’re going to get near apocalyptic rain later on today.
That’s a good thing. Maybe it will wash all this damn dust out of the air.
Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, noted for “77 Sunset Strip”. NYT.
Broadcast on ABC from 1958 to 1964, “77 Sunset Strip” starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Roger Smith as a pair of suave Los Angeles private eyes and Mr. Byrnes as the parking-lot attendant at the restaurant next door to their office.
As he ministered tenderly to the Thunderbird convertible driven by Mr. Zimbalist in the show, Kookie (né Gerald Lloyd Kookson III) ran his omnipresent pocket comb through his lush ducktailed pompadour, cracked his devil-may-care grin and spouted aphorisms that even at midcentury had all the gnomic obscurity of Zen koans:
“A dark seven” (a depressing week); “piling up the Z’s” (getting some sleep); “headache grapplers” (aspirin); “buzzed by germsville” (to become ill); and, most emblematically, “Baby, you’re the ginchiest!” — a phrase of the highest Kookian approbation.
His character evolved from parking attendant to junior partner in the detective agency, but he was pretty much typecast after that. Deadline suggests that he partially inspired the Rick Dalton character in “Once Upon a Time In Hollywood”. He did go on to play the dance host in “Grease” and did a fair number of guest shots on TV shows…
…yes, including “Mannix”. (“A Penny for the Peep Show”, season 3, episode 6.)
Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, Texas sculptor of giant objects.
…
…
A few years after the boots were disassembled and moved to a mall in San Antonio on three flatbed trucks in 1980, Mr. Wade got a phone call from the mall’s manager. A homeless man had found his way into one of the boots and cooked his lunch there. The boot was on fire.
“It was the size of a small apartment, kind of a nice spot, and he was cooking lunch with cans of Sterno, and smoke was emerging from the top of the boots,” Mr. Wade said in “Too High, Too Wide and Too Long.”
The great Buck Henry.
He was a co-writer of “The Graduate”, co-created “Get Smart” with Mel Brooks, did guest stints on “Saturday Night Live” in the early days (and was the first five-timer), created “Quark”, wrote the screnplays for “Catch-22” and “The Day of the Dolphin”, co-wrote the legendary disaster “Town and Country“…man, what a career.
(Edited to add: NYT obit wasn’t up previously. It is now.)
Mike Resnick, noted SF writer. Lawrence has an excellent obit up at his site, and pretty much says everything I was going to say. I won’t say we were personal friends (I don’t think he would have passed Lawrence’s “pick me out of a police lineup” test) but he was a good and erudite guy who got me into Theodore Roosevelt and “Duck, You Sucker!” (among other things). His passing leaves the world a smaller, colder place.
Edited to add: found this, by way of Dean Bradley’s Twitter, and thought it was a nice tribute to Mr. Resnick.
“Science Fiction is the literature of warning: this bad thing will happen IF…”
All the possibilities in the world are loaded into that statement. I think about that whenever I sit down to write a sci fi story. And I always think of Mike when I do it.
RIP Mr Resnick. 3/3
— Daniel J Davis (@DanielJWrites) January 9, 2020
Edited to add 2: Michael Swanwick on Mr. Resnick.
I had not heard of Adela Holzer before her obit showed up in the paper of record, but her story is too good to ignore. She was married to a “shipping magnate” and was an early investor in the musical “Hair”. (Depending on which account you believe, she put in $57,000 and made $2 million, or she put in $7,500 and made $115,000.) She went on to produce the notorious flop “Dude“.
Then it got worse. You may ask: how much worse can it get than having your show close on opening night? This much worse:
At that point, theater was the least of Ms. Holzer’s problems. She had declared bankruptcy seven weeks earlier. She had been arrested on fraud charges over the summer and was free on $50,000 bail, awaiting the first of the three criminal trials that would shape the rest of her life.
The indictment, which finally came in 1979, was for a classic Ponzi scheme: paying her earliest victims “profits,” which were really just funds from her next group of investors, and so on. One of those early investors was Jeffrey Picower, who was later implicated in the Bernie Madoff scandal, a much larger Ponzi scheme.
She served two years in prison. Ms. Holzer tried to make a comeback in the 1980s with a musical about Joseph McCarthy that never opened.
She served four years (of an eight year sentence) for that.
Things had changed in 2001, when she was arrested yet again, this time charged with 39 counts of fraud. At the time, she was using a different surname, Rosian — she was living with a man named Vladimir Rosian on the Upper West Side — and the stakes were much lower. She had been charging immigrants $2,000 to $2,700 each, falsely telling them that she had influence on immigration legislation and could help them gain permanent resident status.
This time she was sentenced to nine to 18 years. When she was released in June 2010, she was in her 80s.
Noted:
Peter Laviolette fired as coach of the Nashville Predators, who are a hockey team in the NHL. (Also out: “associate coach” Kevin McCarthy.) He was 248-143-60 over a little more than five seasons.
In the “questionable firings” bucket: Wade Phillips contract as defensive coordinator with the Rams has not been renewed. (Also out: Skip Peete, running backs coach.)
Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation. She was 52.
The writer David Samuels, a friend since childhood, said the cause was metastatic breast cancer, a disease that resulted from the BRCA genetic mutation. Ms. Wurtzel had a double mastectomy in 2015. After her diagnosis, she became an advocate for BRCA testing — something she had not had — and wrote about her cancer experience in The New York Times.
“I could have had a mastectomy with reconstruction and skipped the part where I got cancer,” she wrote. “I feel like the biggest idiot for not doing so.”
Technically, I’m not sure this is an actual firing.
But the word has come down form the mountain top for real: Jason Garrett’s contract with the Cowboys is not being renewed.
And what better time to announce it than on Sunday during the playoffs?
Running a little late on this one, but: Joe Moorhead out as coach of Mississippi State.
14-12 in two seasons, 7-9 in the SEC, and the team had internal and NCAA problems. But he did win the Egg Bowl.
Sam Wyche, former coach of the Bengals and Buccaneers. He was 61-66 (3-2 in playoffs) in Cincinnati and 23-41 in Tampa.
For the historical record: NYT obits for Jack Sheldon and Syd Mead.
Don Larsen, pitcher for the Yankees and the only man ever to pitch a perfect game in a World Series. ESPN.
Jack “Only A Bill” Sheldon. Mark Evanier has a nice tribute up at his blog, with two funny stories about the late Mr. Sheldon (who, in addition to his “Schoolhouse Rock” work, did several appearances on the late 60’s/early 70s “Dragnet”).
Martin West. He did bit parts on a lot of stuff, including “Ironside”, “The Invaders”, and “Hill Street Blues”.
(Hattip on all three of these to Lawrence.)
For the historical record: David Stern. ESPN. Field of Schemes.
Last one of the year.
Sonny Mehta, book guy.
Gen. Paul X. Kelley, former commandant of the United States Marines.
The Beirut bombing took place four months into his time as commandant.
On the road, but wanted to get this in.
John Dorsey out as the Browns general manager.
Cleveland.com is spinning this as the owners wanted him to take a reduced non-GM role, and he said no.
Neil Innes, musical humorist.
In the early 1960s he was one of the first members of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, also known as simply the Bonzo Dog Band. He wrote the group’s biggest hit, “I’m the Urban Spaceman,” which climbed into the Top 10 on the British charts in 1968.
In the 1970s he wrote material for Monty Python, the groundbreaking six-member comedy troupe. Midway through that decade he and Eric Idle, a Python, came up with the Rutles, a deadpan parody of the Beatles; the group not only recorded albums but also made films, most notably the mock documentary “The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash” in 1978.
Sleepy LaBeef, noted rockabilly musician.
Lee Mendelson, producer of “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.