Lawrence sent over an obit for Joe McKinney. He was a San Antonio based horror writer who won two Bram Stoker awards.
…
He was 52.
Obit watch: July 23, 2021.
July 23rd, 2021Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh…
July 23rd, 2021…here I am at Camp Granada Quinebarge.
The rustic overnight camp abruptly shut down earlier this month after just six days. Camp directors informed parents, who had shelled out $3,400 for two weeks, that they needed to pick up their children the next morning, following a “summer of challenges” capped off by delays from the camp’s food supplier that made continuing untenable.
The decision to close the 85-year-old camp in Moultonborough, N.H., in the middle of the summer left campers bereft, counselors stewing, and some parents furious. Soon, stories began to circulate of problems that went much deeper than late deliveries: counselors hired just days before camp and lacking basic training; a counselor punched in the face by a child and a camper later hit in the head by the same child; dirty dishes provided at multiple meals; at least four campers vomiting and getting quarantined, while some parents said they weren’t informed; and staff quitting and being fired in high numbers.
…
I had to post this for two reasons. One is that I can’t pass up a good Fyre Festival reference. And the other? I also can’t pass up a good classical reference.
There is such a thing as taking gun crankery too far.
July 21st, 2021When you are stealing stuff, you’ve gone too far. Especially if you are stealing stuff from Valley Forge.
The rifle was made by Johann Christian Oerter. This is the rifle.
The rifle turned up again in July of 2018.
Mr. Gavin pled guilty yesterday. I would have thought the statute of limitations would have run out on this, but the NYT reports he pled to one count of “disposing of an object of cultural heritage stolen from a museum”, which I guess is how they got around that. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. (Insert obligatory note on maximum sentencing in the federal system, especially for a 78 year old man with no prior record as far as I can tell.)
I can’t tell for sure, but I think this is a later edition of the Shumway book. (And this is the most current edition, with an added co-author.)
…
Obit watch: July 21, 2021.
July 21st, 2021Rick Laird, noted musician.
The guitarist John McLaughlin called Mr. Laird in 1971 with an invitation to join a group he was forming with the goal of uniting the jazz-rock aesthetic — which Mr. McLaughlin had helped establish as a member of Miles Davis and Tony Williams’s earliest electric bands — with Indian classical music and European experimentalism.
The new ensemble, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which also featured the drummer Billy Cobham, the keyboardist Jan Hammer and the violinist Jerry Goodman, became one of the most popular instrumental bands of its time. It released a pair of studio albums now regarded as classics for Columbia Records, “The Inner Mounting Flame” (1971) and “Birds of Fire” (1973), and one live album, “Between Nothingness & Eternity” (1973).
After leaving Mahavishnu, he went on to tour with other artists and did one solo album. But he decided in 1982 that he needed a backup career path. So he became a professional photographer. (The NYT says that he did continue to write and perform music, but none of it has been “officially released”.)
My feelings about baseball are well known, but I did want to highlight the passing of Marjorie Adams. She spent a lot of time researching and lobbying for her great-grandfather’s (Daniel Adams) place as a founding father of baseball.
Making the case for her great-grandfather, who was known as Doc (he came by his nickname legitimately, having received a medical degree from Harvard in 1838), became Ms. Adams’s consuming passion. She advocated for him on a website, at conferences, at meetings of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and at vintage baseball festivals, where fans play and celebrate the sport, as if it were the 19th century. She nicknamed herself Cranky, for “cranks,” a period term for fans.
“Baseball is the national pastime,” she said in an interview in 2014 with SABR’s Smoky Joe Wood chapter. “It’s important that the historical record is correct.”
That record was a lie for a long time, according to John Thorn, baseball’s official historian. Abner Doubleday was for many years falsely cited as baseball’s inventor. And Alexander Cartwright, who played a role in the sport’s evolution, was credited on his plaque at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., with some of the innovations that, it turned out, were actually conceived by Adams.
…
Doc Adams began playing for the pioneering New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club in 1845. While with the team, he created the shortstop position — as a relay man from the outfield, not a fielder of ground balls and pop flies. He made his most critical contributions to the game in 1857 at a rule-making convention of which he was chairman.
There he codified some of the fundamentals of the modern game, setting the distance between bases at 90 feet, the length of a game at nine innings and the number of men per side at nine.
Quick followup.
July 21st, 2021The Drive has an article on that spectacular jumping car I posted the other day.
Their coverage adds quite a bit, including a diagram of what appears to have happened and a link to (low quality) security cam video from another angle.
And, yes, the comments are full of Dukes of Hazard references…
More things I did not know…
July 21st, 2021In an emergency, a potato chip bag and duct tape can be used as a chest seal. I don’t recommend this unless you have advanced EMT training, and I’m not sure which flavor of chips works best.
$10,000 face value in pennies weighs approximately three tons.
I think that entire article is interesting: it goes into more detail than you ever wanted to know about US pennies (and to a lesser extent, Canadian ones), as well as the economics of same. The only issue is that the events the author describes took place between 2008 and 2009, so it is a little dated.
Pennybullion.com is still in business, and will sell you $100 (face value) worth of copper pennies for $169.95 (plus $10.95 shipping and handling). They are not currently purchasing pennies, just in case you were thinking about getting into the copper penny business.
And you can still buy a Ryedale Sorter, but they go for about $500 now instead of $250.
Obit watch: July 20, 2021.
July 20th, 2021Dr. Paul Auerbach, one of the pioneering figures in “wilderness medicine”.
A medical student at Duke University at the time, he went to work in 1975 with the Indian Health Service on a Native American reservation in Montana, and the experience was revelatory.
“We saw all kinds of cases that I would have never seen at Duke or frankly anywhere else except on the reservation,” Dr. Auerbach said in a recent interview given to Stanford University, where he worked for many years. “Snakebites. Drowning. Lightning strike.”
“And I just thoroughly enjoyed it,” he continued. “Taking care of people with very limited resources.”
Back at Duke he tried to learn more about outdoor medicine, but he struggled to find resource material.
“I kept going back to literature to read, but there was no literature,” he said. “If I wanted to read about snake bites, I was all over the place. If I wanted to read about heat illness, I was all over the place. So I thought, ‘Huh, maybe I’ll do a book on wilderness medicine.’”
…
The resulting book, “Management of Wilderness and Environmental Emergencies,” which he edited with a colleague, Edward Geehr, was published in 1983 and is widely considered the definitive textbook in the field, with sections like “Protection From Blood-Feeding Arthropods” and “Aerospace Medicine: The Vertical Frontier.” Updated by Dr. Auerbach over 30 years, it is in its seventh edition and now titled “Auerbach’s Wilderness Medicine.”
“Paul literally conceived of this subspecialty of medicine,” said Dr. Andra Blomkalns, chair of emergency medicine at Stanford. “At the time, there wasn’t a recognition that things happen when you’re out doing things. He developed this notion of, ‘Things happen to people all the time.’ Which is now a big part of our identity in emergency medicine.”
John P. McMeel, co-founder of Universal Press Syndicate (later Andrews McMeel Universal).
Indefatigably sunny, Mr. McMeel had the optimism — and the stamina — of a true salesman. Jim Davis, the creator of the misanthropic cat Garfield, first met Mr. McMeel at an American Booksellers Association convention in 1981. Mr. McMeel approached him for an autograph, brandishing a Garfield book with a contract tucked inside. But Mr. Davis had a long-term contract with United Media, which had been syndicating his strip.
“It became a running gag,” Mr. Davis said. “Every time we met he’d hand me a newspaper or something with a contract inside.” After 15 years, Mr. Davis was finally free to sign with Universal.
“The thing with John,” he said, “is it didn’t feel like business. I once did an interview and the reporter asked me why Gary Larson had retired and I was still going. I said: ‘Well, Gary works so hard and he puts so much pressure on himself. Me, if I feel that kind of pressure, I lower my standards.’ It was that kind of air that John encouraged.”
For the record: NYT obit for Kurt Westergaard.
Bagatelle (#39?)
July 19th, 2021Quick throw away post of two videos by way of the NYPost.
1) I don’t think that is going to buff out…
2) I’m only posting this one so I can say, “Go forth and kill! Zardoz has spoken!”
Obit watch: July 19, 2021.
July 19th, 2021William F. Nolan, SF writer. His most famous work (co-authored with George Clayton Johnson) was Logan’s Run, basis for the movie of the same name.
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
Kurt Westergaard, cartoonist.
He gained global notoriety in 2005 for his controversial depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in Jyllands-Posten, which published 12 editorial cartoons of the principal figure of Islam under the headline, “The Face of Mohammed.”
Westergaard was behind the most controversial of the cartoons published by the paper, showing the prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, according to the BBC. The cartoon intended to make a point about self-censorship and criticism of Islam.
He was 86, and died in his sleep.
Very brief historical note (some parental guidance suggested).
July 17th, 2021Today is the 40th anniversary of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency skywalk collapse.
This is something that shook me up at the time, and I’m not sure I can do it justice today. KMBC 9 has put up a documentary, “The Skywalk Tapes”, which I feel comfortable embedding here. (I thought about using the “Seconds From Disaster” episode, but all the YouTube copies I could find were low quality.)
Texas A&M Civil Engineering Ethics Site case study. Photos of the failed components (nothing graphic).
Obit watch: July 17, 2021.
July 17th, 2021Quick roundup, in some haste:
Biz Markie. 57. Damn.
Dennis Murphy, founder of the American Basketball Association. Also the World Hockey Association, the International Women’s Professional Softball League, and Roller Hockey International.
“He was fun and creative,” Mr. O’Brien said, “and he was always hustling somebody.”
History repeats itself.
July 16th, 2021The first time as farce. Also the second time:
A literal ‘Malice in the Palace’ style brawl between players and fans in the stands of the NJ Jackals game just broke out while @NjTank99 was judging a hotdog contest on the other side of the stadium.
Dollar Beer night in independent baseball hits different pic.twitter.com/yBT4qthRAL
— TJ (RUTGERS) (@TJHitchings) July 16, 2021
As a side note, 10 cents in 1974 dollars works out to 55 cents in 2021 dollars, so I think those fans were getting rooked.
Fair food!
July 15th, 2021The State Fair of Texas is coming. And with that, fair food!
KXAN has a rundown of the 32 semifinalists for the “Big Tex Choice Awards”.
It seems like there’s not a lot on a stick this year. But out of 19 “savory” dishes, I see three “deep fried”, three “fried”, and seven that include “fried” in the description but not the title.
That does sort of invoke I-35 for me. Specifically, it invokes a multi-car pileup on I-35 during rush hour.
Out of 13 “sweet” dishes, I count six that contain the words “deep fried”, three more that are just “fried”, and two more that do not use the word “fried” in the name, but are fried as part of the prep.
Happy Bastille Day!
July 14th, 2021This is a little more off-the-cuff than usual, as I had to go see the bone guy this morning.
Did you know you can get casts in black? I didn’t know they offered a variety of colors.
I’m now very low speed, high drag, but with a tacticool cast. If I apply myself, I may even be able to rig some MOLLE attachment points to it.
Anyway, happy Bastille Day to y’all. Guzzle some wine and listen to “Revolutions” starting right about here. You can thank me later.
Obit watch: July 13, 2021.
July 13th, 2021Charlie Robinson, actor.
We have “Night Court” on sometimes on Saturday mornings when we’re getting ready for excursions. That was a swell show, and not just because of Harry Anderson or John Larroquette: everybody is great in it. Including Mr. Robinson.
Among other credits, he was in “Gray Lady Down”. (Which, sadly, we have watched recently, so no tribute night.)
Paul “Mr. Wonderful” Orndorff, professional wrestler.
Lawrence sent over a more local obit for Henry Parham.
Administrative note.
July 12th, 2021Saturday night, I broke my left wrist.
It was just about the stupidest accident possible: I was at the top of Lawrence’s stairs, lost my balance, and fell all the way to the bottom of the stairs. I gather it was quite spectacular to watch: as best as I can remember, it was somewhat spectacular to experience.
The broken wrist is the worst of it: I have a few bruises, but no head injuries and nothing else broken.
This is just to say that I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox…er, I mean, blogging might be a little slow while I deal with the fallout from this.
Obit watch: July 12, 2021.
July 12th, 2021Edwin Edwards, former governor of Louisiana.
In January 2011, Mr. Edwards was released from a federal prison in Oakdale, La., after serving more than eight years of a 10-year sentence for bribery and extortion by rigging Louisiana’s riverboat casino licensing process during his last term in office.
Six months later he married. And in the fall, he rode in an open convertible through cheering crowds waving Edwards-for-governor signs at an election-day barbecue. “As you know, they sent me to prison for life,” he told them. “But I came back with a wife.”
Before Mr. Edwards, no one had ever been elected to more than two terms as governor of Louisiana. Indeed, the state constitution prohibits more than two consecutive terms. But from 1972 to 1996, with a couple of four-year furloughs to stoke up his improbable comebacks, Mr. Edwards was the undisputed king of Baton Rouge, a Scripture-quoting, nonsmoking teetotaler who once considered life as a preacher.
Henry Parham. He served in the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion during D-Day.
…
His battalion hoisted large balloons to heights of up to 2,000 feet over Omaha and Utah beaches between D-Day and August 1944, carrying out the mission during the night hours so the balloons would not be spotted by incoming German planes. The balloons were tethered to the ground by cables fitted with small packets of explosive charges. German planes that became entangled in them were likely to be severely damaged or downed.
Mr. Parham’s section of the balloon battalion had reached Omaha Beach in the hours after the arrival of the first waves of infantrymen. (The other section was assigned to Utah Beach.) When the balloonists stepped off small boats, they witnessed a scene of carnage. The American forces, raked by German fire from high ground, had taken heavy casualties.
“We landed in water up to our necks,” Mr. Parham once told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Once we got there we were walking over dead Germans and Americans on the beach. Bullets were falling all around us.”
Mr. Parham told CNN in 2019: “I prayed to the Good Lord to save me. I did my duty. I did what I was supposed to do as an American.”
He was 99.
Thomas Cleary, noted translator and writer.
William Smith, prolific actor. He has 274 credits in IMDB, including the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Rich Man, Poor Man”, “Darker Than Amber”, “Any Which Way You Can”, and “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”.
Pointless trivia (suitable for use in schools).
July 9th, 2021Obit watch: July 9, 2021.
July 9th, 2021Maegle was an all-American as a senior in the 1954 season, when he ran for 905 yards and 11 touchdowns and finished sixth in the balloting for the Heisman Trophy, presented annually to college football’s most outstanding player. The trophy was won that year by the Wisconsin back Alan Ameche (who went on to fame with the Baltimore Colts for scoring the winning touchdown in overtime in the storied 1958 N.F.L. championship game against the New York Giants).
The San Francisco 49ers drafted Maegle in the first round of the January 1955 N.F.L. draft. He was a 49er for five seasons, playing mostly at right safety and occasionally as a running back, then concluded his pro career with the 1960 Pittsburgh Steelers and the 1961 Dallas Cowboys. He intercepted 28 passes, running one of them back for a touchdown.
He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1979.
But he’s best remembered for something that happened in 1954 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas:
Taking a handoff at Rice’s 5-yard line in the second quarter of its matchup with Alabama, Maegle cut to the right and raced down the sideline. When he passed the Alabama bench while crossing midfield, on his way to a virtually certain touchdown, the Crimson Tide fullback Tommy Lewis interrupted his rest period and, sans helmet, sprang onto the field and leveled Maegle with a blindside block at Alabama’s 42-yard line.
The referee ruled that Maegle was entitled to a 95-yard touchdown run. Rice, ranked No. 6 in the nation by The Associated Press, went on to a 28-6 victory over 13th-ranked Alabama.
Chick Vennera, one of those knock-around actors. Credits include “Thank God It’s Friday”, “The Milagro Beanfield War”, and a lot of TV, including “The Golden Girls” and voice work on “Animaniacs”.
James Kallstrom, FBI guy.
In his 27 years with the F.B.I., Mr. Kallstrom helped convict the bosses of New York City’s five Mafia families with cleverly concealed wiretaps and spiked meatballs. And he investigated the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center, expanded the bureau’s surveillance purview to include cellular phones, and recovered a half-million dollars in diamond jewelry that had been stolen by a baggage handler at Kennedy International Airport in 1995 and that had belonged to Sarah, the duchess of York.
In the investigation of the crash of Flight 800, he became the face of the F.B.I. in daily briefings as he and other authorities sought to understand what caused the explosion that sent the jetliner plummeting into the waves off Long Island on July 17, 1996 — one of the deadliest aviation incidents in American history.
He may also be known to some folks as the guy who introduced episodes of “The F.B.I. Files”.
Deep philosophical question.
July 8th, 2021Fans were barred from the pandemic-postponed Tokyo Olympics that will open in two weeks, following a state of emergency issued on Thursday.
The ban was announced by the International Olympic Committee and Japanese organizers, reducing the games to a made-for-TV event.
Why are we still doing this?
(Yes, Lawrence, I know what your answer is: “M-O-N-E-Y!”)
Obit watch: July 8, 2021.
July 8th, 2021Noted for the hysterical record: four of the alleged six assassins of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse have been killed. Two are in custody.
Robert Downey Sr. Variety. THR.
Suzzanne Douglas, actress. She did some theater work:
She also did some film (“How Stella Got Her Groove Back”, “School of Rock”, among others) and a lot of TV work.
Lawrence sent over a memo from the Burning in Hell Department: Ahmad Jibril. He headed the Palestinian terror group PFLP-GC:
He was 83, and it sounds like he died of “natural causes”. (And not the “He was hit by one of those sword missiles fired from a drone, so naturally he died” sort of “natural causes”.)
Real estate watch.
July 8th, 2021For those of you in the UK.
The asking price is £1,100,000 (which works out to about $1.5 million). But: five beds, three bathrooms, 2,954 square feet, a “utility room” and a cellar (that’d be great for your wine collection), plus “reception room”, “garden room”, and “dining room”.
And you can’t put a money value on the prestige of being able to say, “Yes, I live in the old Alan Turing place.”
Obit watch: July 7, 2021.
July 7th, 2021This is bizarre, and I think a little scary. It is also being covered elsewhere, but for the record: Jovenel Moïse, the president of Haiti, was assassinated over night in his home.
FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Brad “Launchpad” Marzari from Plane and Pilot magazine. Mr. Marzari was a blogger and podcaster: he was killed when his plane crashed on approach to Skylark Field in Killeen over the weekend.
I didn’t know him, but he sounds like a pretty cool guy whose passing leaves a void in the world.
Obit watch: July 6, 2021.
July 6th, 2021I feel like he’s been getting the tributes he deserves, and don’t really have much to add to those. Other than: what a career.
Hash Halper. No, you never heard of him: this is one of those kind of obits the NYT does well.
Sometime around 2014, little hearts drawn in chalk mysteriously began appearing on the streets of downtown Manhattan. Some materialized in clusters on sidewalks, while others cascaded along blocks. The hearts inevitably faded away, but for New Yorkers who encountered them, they offered a respite from the harshness of city life.
At least that was the intention of their creator, a street artist named Hash Halper, who started drawing the hearts as a gesture of affection for a woman he was dating. The relationship didn’t last, but the hearts made him feel better, so he kept drawing them. Mr. Halper soon began spreading the healing properties of his hearts, calling himself New York Romantic.
“A heart makes you feel good when you’re not feeling good,” Mr. Halper told Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News” in 2018. “And a heart makes you feel great when you’re feeling great.”
…
Tall and shaggy-haired, Mr. Halper could be seen wearing stylish hats or a red suit covered in hearts while he planted himself on streets for hours, bringing his hearts into existence with pieces of pink, blue and yellow chalk and a swift swoop of his hand. Over time, he became something of a downtown folk hero, cherished for his ability to conjure up positivity with a humble shard of chalk.
Once, when he learned that a woman was having a rough time with her romantic life, he began chalking hearts outside her workplace; she met someone special a few weeks later.
But:
He grappled with sobriety. When he had jobs, he didn’t hold them for long. He was at times homeless and would sleep on the benches of Washington Square Park or the couches of friends. His family had paid his rent over the past year in an apartment on Broome Street that he shared with roommates.
“He didn’t tell people that he was troubled because it was dissonant with his public persona,” his brother Omkar Lewis said. “He was the heart guy, so he couldn’t reveal his problems to the world, because he was the guy carrying other people’s pain.”
…
According to his family, he jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge on June 11th. He was 41.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
Obit watch: July 2, 2021.
July 2nd, 2021John Erman, TV director. Credits include episodes of “Roots”, “Roots II: The Next Generation”, “The Outer Limits”, “Peyton Place”, “My Favorite Martian”, and one episode of a minor 1960s SF TV series.