Austin Police officer Andy Traylor passed away last night.
His death came as a result of severe injuries sustained in a traffic accident on Wednesday.
Obit watch: August 1, 2021.
August 1st, 2021Obit watch: July 31, 2021.
July 31st, 2021Carl Levin, Senator from Michigan.
Richard Lamm, Colorado governor.
As a state lawmaker from 1966 to 1974, he also campaigned against Denver’s hosting the 1976 Olympics even though the city had been awarded the Games. He argued that it would damage the environment and sap state funds. Colorado voters rejected spending government money on the Games, and the event was shifted to Innsbruck, Austria.
Denver voters later passed an initiative requiring voter approval for any future proposals to host the Olympics. Mr. Lamm once said that he had been treated as a “pariah” by the business community over the episode.
Quick notes from the legal beat.
July 30th, 2021Two quick legal stories that I find interesting, ripped from the pages of the NYT.
1. Remember the Bonhomme Richard fire, about a year ago? Totally wiped out the ship?
The Navy has charged one of the crew with aggravated arson and “willfully hazarding a vessel”. Which is just kind of…wow. I don’t know what to say.
2. Lawrence Handley has pled guilty to two counts of second-degree kidnapping and one count of attempted second-degree kidnapping. He could get anywhere from 15 to 35 years in prison, and frankly I’m surprised he’s not getting the death penalty, or a life sentence for felony murder.
Mr. Handley decided to hire two guys to kidnap his wife.
Mr. Handley’s lawyer, Kevin Stockstill, said in an interview that his client had been using methamphetamine and cocaine for days when he hatched the plan to have his wife kidnapped. He said that Mr. Handley had planned to “come in as a hero” and rescue Ms. Handley in an effort to “win her back.”
“It was certainly not logical thinking, but when you’re doing a lot of meth and cocaine, I guess it seemed rational to him,” Mr. Stockstill said. “It turned out to be a terrible decision.”
(As a side note, “Mr. Handley had run software and vitamin businesses and had been the chief executive of a series of drug treatment centers that sold in 2015 in a deal worth about $21 million…”)
Anyway, the two men pulled off the kidnapping successfully. But as they were making their getaway, sheriff’s deputies noticed the van driving “erratically” and tried to pull it over. They didn’t know anything about the kidnapping at the time.
A police chase ensued.
Obit watch: July 29, 2021.
July 29th, 2021Supplemental: NYT obit for Dusty Hill.
City Journal tribute to Jackie Mason. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
The quirky products certainly sounded like inventions Americans could live without — an Inside-the-Shell Electric Egg Scrambler, spray-on fake hair in a can, the Pocket Fisherman (“the biggest fishing invention since the hook … and still only $19.95!”), and the counter-size Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ (“Set it and forget it!”), one of his biggest successes.
His redesigned 1975 Veg-O-Matic is enshrined in the Smithsonian’s American Legacies collection alongside the Barbie doll, and comedian Dan Aykroyd vigorously parodied both salesman and machine in Bass-O-Matic skits on “Saturday Night Live” in the 1970s.
George Rhoads. I had not heard of him previously, but his work sounds really cool.
Mr. Rhoads’s colorful “audio-kinetic ball machines,” which evoked the workings of watches and roller coasters, were built of comically designed tracks and devices like loop-the-loops and helical ramps, and were usually six- to 10-feet high. Scores of the machines have been installed in children’s hospitals, malls, science museums and airports and elsewhere in a dozen countries, but mostly in the United States and Japan.
“Each pathway that the ball takes is a different drama, as I call it, because the events happen in a certain sequence, analogous to drama,” he said in an interview in 2014 with Creative Machines, which makes ball machines based on and inspired by his designs. “The ball gets into certain difficulties. It does a few things. Maybe there’s some conflict. They hit or they wander, whatever it is and then there’s some kind of dramatic conclusion.”
One of his most frequently viewed machines, “42nd Street Ballroom,” was installed in 1983 in the lobby of Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, where it remained. Eight feet tall and eight feet wide, the sculpture shows its plates spin, its levers flip and its 24 billiard balls roll down ramps. As was typical of his machines, numerous balls move independently, letting gravity guide them and, when they reach the bottom, they are returned to the top by a motorized hoist.
Joey Jordison, drummer and founding member of Slipknot.
Rick Aiello, actor. (“Do The Right Thing”, lots of TV credits including “18 Wheels of Justice”)
For the record, he was Danny Aiello’s son.
Quote of the day.
July 28th, 2021Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a “conversation” with you. We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you. Any commander who claims he is “too busy to read” is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way. The consequences of incompetence in battle are final. History teaches that we face nothing new under the sun. The Commandant of the Marine Corps maintains a list of required reading for every rank. All Marines read a common set; in addition, sergeants read some books, and colonels read others. Even generals are assigned a new set of books that they must consume. At no rank is a Marine excused from studying. When I talked to any group of Marines, I knew from their ranks what books they had read. During planning and before going into battle, I could cite specific examples of how others had solved similar challenges. This provided my lads with a mental model as we adapted to our specific mission.
Reading shed light on the dark path ahead. By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present…
—Call Sign Chaos, Jim Mattis and Bing West
(Obviously, I like this quote. Gen. Mattis was speaking more in the context of history, especially military history. But I think this can be extended way out: the more I think about it, the more I think that all books – history, science, biography, books about farming, even fiction – are a honor and a gift from someone who sat down to have a “conversation” with you, and it is worth your time and effort, even if you are not a combat Marine, to “take advantage of such accumulated experiences”.
Of course, some of those people who are trying to have a conversation with you are the kind of person who would be called a “bore” in social circles. There’s no obligation to read, or to finish, everything: just to keep an open mind.)
Bonus quote of the day, from the same source:
“What is a Marine doing here?” Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin asked when I entered her office.
“Madam Ambassador,” I said, “I’m taking a few thousand of my best friends to Afghanistan to kill some people.” She smiled and said, “I think I can help you.” Never before had I personally experienced a diplomat’s impact so directly.
Obit watch: July 28, 2021 (supplemental)
July 28th, 2021I am seeing reports that Dusty Hill of ZZ Top has passed, but I have not yet found a reliable source for this.
I’ll update here if I do find one.
Edited to add: short preliminary obit from the Statesman. Variety.
EtA2: NYPost.
EtA3:
RIP Dusty Hill – great bassist, great Texan, great Hill pic.twitter.com/Cf7Pf1s3Y4
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 28, 2021
Obit watch: July 28, 2021.
July 28th, 2021This is another one of those NYT style obits for someone who wasn’t so famous, but was still a figure worth noting. Mr. Elidrissi emigrated from Morocco to the United States in 1966 and got a job as a bellhop at the Waldorf Astoria…
…where he worked until 2017.
…
He remembered encountering Ronald Reagan during the 1980 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter.
“‘Here you go, Mr. President,’” he recalled saying in greeting the candidate, “and he goes, ‘No, no, don’t call me that yet!’ So I say, ‘Look, Mr. President, you’re going to win and when you win send me something for my son.’ Later that year, he sent us a signed picture made out to my son.”
When Reagan returned to the hotel years after leaving office, he greeted Mr. Elidrissi by saying, “‘You’re still here, Jim!’”
Stretching the definition of an obit just a wee bit…
Spoiler: it looks like pretty much all of these guys were older than dirt.
With twelve you get eggroll.
July 28th, 2021It seems that I have been blogging for twelve years as of today.
This is, frankly, a number that astonishes me. I really don’t know what to say, beyond the obligatory anniversary post.
And also, thanks to the readers and contributors: Borepatch, Lawrence, Joe D, tim kies, Glypto Dropem (who left a very perceptive comment the other day on chest seals and pennies), Jimmy McNulty, RoadRich, The Real Kurt, Heather Dobrott, and a bunch of other folks I’m probably unintentionally forgetting.
Twelve years. I mean, seriously, the mind boggles. The blogger goes to get another cup of coffee. (In the current official mug of WCD. There is a story behind this, which I may tell at some point: but for now, I do not get any royalties from the sale of these mugs by the NYPost Store.)
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#70 in a series)
July 27th, 2021Mike the Musicologist sent me a story that I missed.
The mayor of Rochester, New York, Lovely Warren, was indicted on July 16th. For the second time.
The first time was back in October for campaign finance violations.
This time? Would you believe…guns?
The other half of the couple is Timothy Granison, her husband, who has his own set of problems. Specifically, he and five other people have been charged with “conspiracy to possess and distribute cocaine”.
Mayor Warren lost the Democratic primary last month, so she will not be serving another term. She has not been implicated in the dope ring, either.
Noted:
Guess that answers that question.
Obit watch: July 27, 2021.
July 27th, 2021Michael Enzi, fomer Senator from Wyoming. He’s the second prominent person I’ve seen recently who has died as a result of a bicycle accident (the other one was Greg Knapp, an assistant coach for the Jets).
I guess the moral is: be careful out there.
Dale “Snort” Snodgrass was killed in a plane crash over the weekend. The Drive put up a very nice obit for him.
You may not have heard his name, and you wouldn’t recognize him from this photo. But if you follow military aviation at all, you will recognize this photo.
…
I have not had a chance to watch this yet, but Ward Carroll did a live stream tribute to Mr. Snodgrass on Sunday night. Here it is for bookmark purposes (about 40 minutes):
Obit watch: July 26, 2021.
July 26th, 2021Supplemental Steven Weinberg obits: NYT. Statesman.
Jackie Mason, comedian.
Mr. Mason regarded the world around him as a nonstop assault on common sense and an affront to his sense of dignity. Gesturing frantically, his forefinger jabbing the air, he would invite the audience to share his sense of disbelief and inhabit his very thin skin, if only for an hour.
“I used to be so self-conscious,” he once said, “that when I attended a football game, every time the players went into a huddle, I thought they were talking about me.” Recalling his early struggles as a comic, he said, “I had to sell furniture to make a living — my own.”
The idea of music in elevators sent him into a tirade: “I live on the first floor; how much music can I hear by the time I get there? The guy on the 28th floor, let him pay for it.”
…
After dozens of appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Mr. Mason encountered disaster on Oct. 18, 1964. A speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson pre-empted the program, which resumed as Mr. Mason was halfway through his act. Onstage but out of camera range, Sullivan indicated with two fingers, then one, how many minutes Mr. Mason had left, distracting the audience. Mr. Mason, annoyed, responded by holding up his own fingers to the audience, saying, “Here’s a finger for you, and a finger for you, and a finger for you.”
Sullivan, convinced that one of those fingers was an obscene gesture, canceled Mr. Mason’s six-show contract and refused to pay him for the performance. Mr. Mason sued, and won.
The two later reconciled, but the damage was done. Club owners and booking agents now regarded him, he said, as “crude and unpredictable.”
“People started to think I was some kind of sick maniac,” Mr. Mason told Look. “It took 20 years to overcome what happened in that one minute.”
…
For the record (and per Wikipedia), “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” went through 182 preview performances.
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Laura Foreman. She was a prominent and well-regarded reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1970s: so much so that she got hired by the NYT.
Her focus was Philadelphia’s 1975 mayoral race, in which the brash and cocky incumbent, Frank L. Rizzo, the city’s former police commissioner, was seeking a second term.
One of Mr. Rizzo’s close allies was Mr. Cianfrani, a longtime ward boss who became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and one of Pennsylvania’s most influential lawmakers. A streetwise power broker, he was a natural source and occasional subject for the new political writer.
Rumors began circulating that the two were involved romantically, but Ms. Foreman denied them, and the editors discounted them.
After she got hired by the NYT, it came out that the rumors were true: “…the politician had given her more than $20,000 worth of gifts, including jewelry, furniture and a fur coat, and helped her buy a 1964 Morgan sports car.”
The Times told her she had to resign, even though the conduct in question had occurred at another paper. The Times, in fact, said initially that her work had comported with the highest ethical standards. But according to an account that Ms. Foreman wrote in The Washington Monthly in 1978, A.M. Rosenthal, The Times’s executive editor, told her that because the paper was writing tough stories at the time about conflicts of interest involving Bert Lance, a close Carter adviser, it couldn’t very well harbor a conflict of its own.
To others, Mr. Rosenthal uttered an unforgettable comment that has been rendered several different ways but in essence said that he didn’t care if his reporters were having sex with elephants — as long as they weren’t covering the circus.
In Philadelphia, Mr. Roberts, the Inquirer editor, appointed the paper’s top investigative team of Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele to dig into the affair. They produced a 17,000-word article, published on Oct. 16, 1977, that exposed internal rivalries at the paper and found that editors had looked the other way to protect a favored reporter, Ms. Foreman. It was among the first instances of a newspaper turning its investigative artillery on itself.
She married Mr. Cianfrani, but never worked in journalism again. Ms. Foreman actually passed away over a year ago, but her death was only recently reported.
A burning in Hell watch, by way of Lawrence: Rodney Alcala, the “Dating Game” killer.
A longhaired photographer who lured women by offering to take their pictures, Mr. Alcala was convicted of killing a 12-year-old girl and four women in Orange County, Calif., and two women in New York, all between 1971 and 1979, the authorities said.
Investigators had also suspected him of, or had linked him to, other murders in Los Angeles, Seattle, Arizona, New Hampshire and Marin County, Calif., the department said.
…
In 1978, six years after he was convicted of molesting [removed – DB], Mr. Alcala appeared in a brown bell-bottom suit and a shirt with a butterfly collar as “Bachelor No. 1” on an episode of “The Dating Game.”
The host described him as “a successful photographer,” according to a YouTube video. “Between takes, you might find him sky-diving or motorcycling.”
Mr. Alcala won the contest, charming the bachelorette with sexual innuendo. The woman later decided not to go on a date with him because she found him disturbing, according to several news reports.
Obit watch: July 24, 2021.
July 24th, 2021I am seeing reports that Steven Weinberg, one of the great physicists, has died.
The University of Texas has a tribute up, but I have not found a mainstream news source reporting this yet.
…
…
Obit watch: July 23, 2021.
July 23rd, 2021Lawrence sent over an obit for Joe McKinney. He was a San Antonio based horror writer who won two Bram Stoker awards.
…
He was 52.
Hello 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.)
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