“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 17

April 16th, 2020

All of these are just a little outside my target run length, but that’s okay. I hope everyone can deal with that.

First up: this might be just a little too much, even for my readers who are people of the gun. But I wanted to put it up because it is a nice slice of history from around the time I was born.

“Target Vs.”, a 1965 film from the Williams Gun Sight company about the 1965 National Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio.

I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough to compete at Camp Perry, but I’d like to visit there one of these days while the matches are going on. Just to take in the scene.

Bonus video #1: “No Points For Second Place”. This is apparently a Grumman produced tribute to the F-14. With some handy tips on dogfighting thrown in.

Bonus video #2: “Police Pursuit Driving Part 2”. I guess this is a sequel (at least thematically) to “Police Pursuit“, but it lacks Jack Webb. I think it also lacks Smith and Wessons, though there is one ridiculous bit in here (you’ll know it when you see it).

I cannot tell a lie: “Some guys stay rookies forever.” gets a rise out of me.

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Obit watch: April 16, 2020.

April 16th, 2020

I received a report from a usually reliable source that Brian Dennehy has passed, but I don’t have any independent or linkable confirmation of that at the moment.

Edited to add: THR has an obit up now. Variety does as well.

NYT obit for John Horton Conway.

“Conway’s LIFE changed mine,” the musician Brian Eno said in an email. “I think Conway himself thought it rather trivial, but for a nonmathematician like me, it was a shock to the intuition, a shattering revelation — to watch glorious complexity emerging from staid simplicity.”

…

At Princeton he was almost invariably recruited to give the first-year course intended to persuade students to become math majors. And he offered extracurricular content, like a campus tour titled “How to Stare at a Brick Wall.”

…

Math, Dr. Conway believed, should be fun. “He often thought that the math we were teaching was too serious,” said Mira Bernstein, a mathematician and a former executive director of Canada/USA Mathcamp, an international summer program for high-school students. “And he didn’t mean that we should be teaching them silly math — to him, fun was deep. But he wanted to make sure that the playfulness was always, always there.”

Willie Davis, one of the Green Bay Packers greats.

Davis’s Packer teams captured N.F.L. championships following the 1961, ’62 and ’65 seasons and won the first two Super Bowls, defeating the Kansas City Chiefs in 1967 and the Oakland Raiders in 1968.
Davis was an all-N.F.L. player five times and chosen for the Pro Bowl five times as well. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1981 and named to its all-N.F.L. team for the 1960s.
His Packers defeated the Giants in the 1961 and 1962 championship games, and he impressed New York’s star quarterback, Y.A. Tittle. “Davis is a great pass rusher,” Tittle was quoted as saying. “He’s strong and aggressive. He’s always towering over you, coming, coming, all the time.”

Posted in Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Happy BAG Day!

April 15th, 2020

As long as we’re talking about NRA videos and books, I thought I’d mention once again: today is National Buy a Gun Day.

I usually cut folks some slack if BAG Day falls on a Sunday or Monday. This year, I’m going to continue with the slack cutting, given the current circumstances: if you place an order for something today, or purchase something before the end of the day on Sunday, it counts.

I still haven’t found anything I really want: Classic Firearms is selling Beretta M9 pistols for $450. This kind of appeals to me, as someone who has a half-baked desire to accumulate a collection of every US military sidearm, but I don’t know that $450 is all that great a price.

CDNN is offering Radical Firearms AR pattern rifles in .224 Valkyrie for $500. I’m intrigued by .224 Valkyrie as a caliber, but I know nothing about Radical Firearms: I think I’d prefer to either buy a complete rifle from a manufacturer I know something about, or buy a finished upper (again, from someone I’m familiar with) and build up my own .224 rifle.

There’s a nice 4″ S&W in .45 Colt on GunBroker, but it’s up close to $800 right now, which is right on the edge of what I want to pay. I’m pretty confident it will break $1,000 by the time the auction ends tomorrow. Somebody else has another one for sale with a starting bid of $500, but it isn’t as nice.

I still haven’t been able to get out and do any gun photos yet, but I’m hoping to have that done by the weekend.

In the meantime, feel free to post comments with your BAG Day purchase, or send photos, or both.

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 16

April 15th, 2020

Our first video today is a little longer than usual, and also not exactly a random YouTube find. This one was recommended to us by great and good FOTB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl Rehn. (Speaking of stuff rescued from obscurity, that NRA pistol manual is pretty spiffy, too.)

“It Could Happen to You!”, a NRA film from the 1970s for women. The archive.org notes say it doesn’t have any guns in it: “Women are shown rather defending themselves with hairpins, their nails, and by locking themselves in their cars with handkerchiefs as SOS flags.”

Bonus video #1: This one should fit a little more comfortably into the coffee break time slot. “The Blackbirds Are Flying”.

No, this isn’t a nature video. This one is from Lockheed Advanced Development Projects, and shows off all three of the Blackbirds.

Bonus video #2: “The Petrified River: The Story of Uranium”. This is a Department of Interior – Bureau of Mines product, but was apparently filmed with the cooperation of the old Union Carbide Corporation. There’s some really nice plane video at the start, RoadRich…

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 15

April 14th, 2020

Back on the beat, but this time something a little different: “Play It Cool: A Question of Attitudes”, a police training film from the 1960s about civility.

I’m just going to make a suggestion here that perhaps this is still relevant.

Bonus video #1: this is relevant to my interests. “Basic Principles Of Power Reactors”, put together long enough ago that it was done by the Atomic Energy Commission.

Bonus video #2: “Viet Cong Mines and Booby Traps”, a 1967 Marine Corps training film.

Posted in Cops, Explosives, History, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 14, 2020.

April 14th, 2020

I’ve been waiting on John Horton Conway: while I’ve seen tributes on Twitter and elsewhere (this one from XKCD is nice), there wasn’t anything I considered reliable until Princeton published their obit this morning.

“John Conway was an amazing mathematician, game wizard, polymath and storyteller who left an indelible mark on everyone he encountered — colleagues, students and beyond — inspiring the popular imagination just as he unraveled some of the deepest mathematical mysteries,” said Igor Rodnianski, professor of mathematics and chair of the Department of Mathematics. “His childlike curiosity was perfectly complemented by his scientific originality and the depth of his thinking. It is a great loss for us and for the entire mathematical world.”
Over his long career, Conway made significant contributions to mathematics in the fields of group theory, number theory, algebra, geometric topology, theoretical physics, combinatorial game theory and geometry.

…

One of Conway’s most well-known accomplishments was the Game of Life, which he conceived in the 1970s to describe how life can evolve from an initial state. The concept builds on ideas that trace back to John von Neumann, a pioneer of early computing, in the 1940s. Conway’s game involves a two-dimensional grid in which each square cell interacts with its neighbors according to a set of rules. Over time, these simple interactions give rise to complexity.
The game was introduced in an October 1970 issue of Scientific American’s mathematical games column, whose creator, the late Martin Gardner, was friends with Conway. Conway continued his interest in “recreational mathematics” by inventing numerous games and puzzles. At Princeton, he often carried in his pockets props such as ropes, pennies, cards, dice, models and sometimes a Slinky to intrigue and entertain students and others.

…

The achievement for which Conway himself was most proud, according to [Simon] Kochen, was his invention of a new system of numbers, the surreal numbers. This continuum of numbers includes not only real numbers such as integers, fractions and irrational numbers such as pi, but also the infinitesimal and infinite numbers.

Hank Steinbrenner, one of the heirs to the New York Yankees.

By way of Lawrence: Keith Ferrell, writer, former editor in chief of Omni, and another one of those people who sounds like a really good guy.

Posted in Geek, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

April 13th, 2020

Things have been kind of slow on the sports firings front. With no real sports being played, who’s firing people?

Answer: the Chicago Bulls, who just fired Gar Forman as their general manager.

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 14

April 13th, 2020

Taking a break from planes today. Let’s go back in history. Way back. To the beginning.

First, the dinosaurs came. Then they died off and turned into oil. Then the Arabs got all the oil and started driving around in Mercedes-Benzes.

Bonus video #1: “Birth of an Oilfield”. Once again, not to be confused with “Birth of a Nation”.

This was produced by George Pal.

Bonus video #2: a promo film for the 1964 World’s Fair, with Lowell Thomas. Thing that pushes my button: he talks with Robert Moses.

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Obit watch: April 13, 2020.

April 13th, 2020

Both of these are by way of Lawrence, originator of the Clown Unicycle Update.

Tarvaris Jackson, former NFL quarterback.

Anthony Causi, sports photographer for the New York Post. He sounds like a really good guy:

“He was a New Yorker,” said Jason Zillo, the Yankees’ vice president of communications and media relations. “Anthony was passionate, he grinded, he cared and was caring, and he wore his heart on his sleeve. And it was a huge heart. I don’t know how it fit on his sleeve. People gravitated towards him, but he had an edge to him and he never wanted to have the second-best photo of the day.”
Balancing that edge, bolstering that heart, was an innate generosity that Causi expressed most regularly with his work tools. Without prompting or requests, he typically took photos of co-workers and competitors in addition to his work subjects, offering them to folks for their personal collections. Causi’s uncle Joe Causi, an on-air personality for WCBS-FM Radio, said his nephew would often take photos pro bono at area Little League events.
“Anthony was kind, thoughtful and one of the best at what he did,” the Rangers said in a statement.

…

There are some people in our lives whose impact is so immediate, and so permanent, it’s all but impossible to remember a time when they weren’t a part of us. That was Anthony. If you worked at The Post, you were family. If you didn’t? That was just a detail. You were family, too.

Posted in Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 13

April 12th, 2020

I wanted something a little bit lighter than cop stuff and military aircraft for Easter. Then this popped up in my YouTube suggestions. I’ve wanted to see this ever since I read about the event in Tex Johnston’s biography.

Bonus: original Boeing promotional video for the Dash 80.

Posted in Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 12, 2020.

April 12th, 2020

Stirling Moss died “quietly on Sunday at his home in London”. He was 90. McThag beat me on the tribute watch.

“To race a car through a turn at maximum possible speed when there is a great lawn to all sides is difficult,” he said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1961, “but to race a car at maximum speed through a turn when there is a brick wall on one side and a precipice on the other — ah, that’s an achievement!”
He raced for 14 years, won 212 of his 529 races in events that included Grand Prix, sports cars and long-distance rallying, in 107 different types of car.
He set the world land speed record on the salt flats of Utah in 1957. He won more than 40 percent of the races he entered, including 16 Grand Prix. For four consecutive years, 1955-58, he finished second in the world Grand Prix championship. And in each of the next three years, he placed third.

The man was a class act. And I don’t mean in terms of style (although he apparently was rather stylish):

He came closest in 1958, but testified on behalf of another driver, Mike Hawthorn, who was accused of an infraction in the Portugal Grand Prix. Hawthorn, as a result, was not disqualified. When the season ended, Hawthorn had 42 points, which are given for factors like fastest lap as well as finishing position. Moss — though he had four Grand Prix wins to Hawthorn’s one — finished second with 41 points.

…

In 1962 at the Goodwood Circuit racetrack in England’s West Sussex County, a plume of fire shot from his Lotus 18/21 car. The crowd gasped. As Moss tried to pass Graham Hill, his car veered and slammed into an eight-foot-high earthen bank.
It took more than a half-hour to free Moss from the wreckage. His left eye and cheekbone were shattered, his left arm broken and his left leg broken in two places.
An X-ray revealed a far worse injury. The right side of his brain was detached from his skull. He was in a coma for 38 days, and paralyzed on one side of his body for six months. He remembered nothing of the disaster. He considered hypnosis to recover the memory, but a psychiatrist said that might cause the paralysis to return.
When he left the hospital, he took all 11 nurses who had treated him to dinner, followed by a trip to the theater. A year later, he returned to Goodwood and pushed a Lotus to 145 m.p.h. on a wet track. He realized he was no longer unconsciously making the right moves. He said he felt like he had lost his page in a book.
Though he believed he remained a better driver than all but 10 or 12 in the world, that was not good enough. He retired at 33.
Moss was more than his talent. He was a beautiful name, one that still connotes high style a half-century after his crash, evoking an era of blazers and cravats, of dance bands and cigarette holders. One legend had him driving hundreds of miles in a vain effort to introduce himself to Miss Italy the night before a big race. His 16 books cemented his legend.

…

Stirling grew up excelling at horsemanship, but said he gave it up because horses were hard to steer.

…

…for a couple of generations, British traffic cops sneeringly asked speeding motorists, “Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?” (Moss, who had been knighted, was once asked that question, and answered, “Sir Stirling, please.”)

Lawrence emailed an obit for Tim Brooke-Taylor, British comedian:

Brooke-Taylor was reunited with Cleese and Chapman on ITV’s At Last The 1948 Show, another collection of sketches and quick-fire repartee.
The first episode featured The Four Yorkshiremen sketch, co-written by Brooke-Taylor, which would later be revived by the Monty Python team.

I apologize for the quality. But: this is (according to YouTube) actually from “At Last the 1948 Show”.

Posted in Cars, Obits | Comments Closed

Trivia.

April 12th, 2020

I discovered this last night: it’s an odd bit of trivia that I didn’t know previously, and I thought it was worth sharing.

The last resident of 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles was Trent Reznor. Not only that, but he set up a recording studio in the house called “Pig”.

…was the site of recording sessions for most of the Nine Inch Nails album The Downward Spiral (1994)

Okay, so what, who cares? Well, 10050 Cielo Drive had a history…

On August 8-9, 1969, the home became the scene of the murders of Tate, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, and Steven Parent at the hands of the Manson “Family”.

…

Manson had told the women to “leave a sign—something witchy”, so Atkins wrote “pig” on the front door in Tate’s blood.

I’ll be honest: I’ve never liked Nine Inch Nails, or Trent Reznor’s music, very much. However, the part of the Rolling Stone interview quoted in the Wikipedia entry is actually kind of thought provoking, and softens my attitude towards the man a bit:

It’s one thing to go around with your dick swinging in the wind, acting like it doesn’t matter. But when you understand the repercussions that are felt … that’s what sobered me up: realizing that what balances out the appeal of the lawlessness and the lack of morality and that whole thing is the other end of it, the victims who don’t deserve that.

Reznor moved out in December of 1993, and the house was demolished in 1994. The owner built a new house on the property, and had the address changed to 10066 Cielo Drive.

Posted in California Über Alles, History, Law, Music | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 12

April 11th, 2020

More planes!

I did briefly consider doing some more police stuff, but I thought I wanted a thematic break after the previous post.

First up, once again for RoadRich and the 1940 Air Terminal Museum folks: “6 1/2 Magic Hours”. That six and a half hours is how long it takes to reach Europe on Pan Am’s 707 Clipper.

Bonus: “Champion of Champions”, a documentary about the Convair B-58 Hustler. Yes, that is Jimmy Stewart: or, properly, Brigadier General James M. Stewart (United States Air Force – Reserve). I don’t think he gets enough credit for his military career, but that’s probably because he was very modest about it. Andy Rooney commented in one of his books that Stewart earned every promotion he got. (He enlisted as a private in March of 1941, and retired in May of 1968.)

(There’s a story about Stewart’s appearance in “The World At War” documentary series: he agreed to appear, but required that he be identified as simply “Jimmy Stewart, pilot.”)

Bonus video #2: “Escape and Survive”, about the development of the B-58’s ejection capsule.

Okay, one more: vintage video of the B-58 flying really low and really fast.

Posted in History, Planes | Comments Closed

Historical Post-It note.

April 11th, 2020

Today is the 34th anniversary of the FBI Miami shootout, perhaps the most studied (and most influential) gunfight in history. Very brief summary: eight FBI agents confronted two men who had been robbing banks and armoured cars. The confrontation ended in a firefight, in which two FBI agents (Jerry L. Dove and Benjamin P. Grogan) were killed and five more were injured (three of them seriously). The two suspects were shot and killed by Agent Ed Mireles, who was one of the agents seriously injured. (Agent Dove inflicted what would have been an eventually fatal wound on one of the suspects, but it was not an immediate stopper: the man Agent Dove shot kept fighting until Agent Mireles got in a finishing shot at close range.)

This is the second of the three events I mentioned in an earlier post. I went back and forth about doing a longer post on this event, and ended up deciding to do a short one instead. This isn’t a round number anniversary, and I’d really like to do more prep work before doing a longer post: next year is the 35th anniversary, and that seems like a good target. On the other hand, I didn’t want to let this anniversary pass without notice.

In the meantime, if you want to dig beyond the Wikipedia entry, I’d start with Ed Mireles’s book: I’m still in the process of reading it, but this has the “Hell, I was there!” factor going for it. Here’s a review of it (with bonus material) from great and good FOTB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl Rehn.

Massad Ayoob has written about this event multiple times in the “Ayoob Files”. His first article is in Ayoob Files: The Book (as a matter of fact, the cover illustration is a crime scene photo from the shootout). As I’ve noted before, you’ll get more value out of purchasing the 1985-2011 “Ayoob Files” PDF from American Handgunner, which contains the original article from 1989, “FBI Miami Shootout: An Update” from 1992, and “25 Years After the FBI Firefight: The Late-Emerging” (also online). There’s at least one more (I may have lost count) “Ayoob Files, “The FBI Dadeland Shootout: Hero Agent Ed Mireles Speaks“, tied to the Mireles book.

The other book I often see cited, and which has been recommended to me, is “Forensic Analysis Of The April 11, 1986, FBI Firefight” by W. French Anderson, which is violently expensive. Then again, this is kind of a specialized publication: I don’t know what it went for when it came out in 2006. (Plus, it was published by the now-defunct Paladin Press.)

“Dark Day in Suniland” was put together by Bob Gilmartin, a local TV reporter who also wrote the forward to Agent Mireles’s book. This documentary came out a year after the event.

Over at Karl’s site, he has another video that combines the FBI reconstruction video, “Firefight” and another video with personal reflections from the agents.

There is a made for TV movie, “In the Line of Duty: The F.B.I. Murders” based on this event, but Agent Mireles states in his book that “dramatic effect apparently took precedence over some of the facts”.

The other agents involved were:

SA Richard Manauzzi.
Supervisor Gordon McNeill (seriously injured).
SA Gilbert Orrantia.
SA John Hanlon (seriously injured).
SA Ronald Risner.

Posted in Books, Cops, FBI, History, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 11, 2020.

April 11th, 2020

Colby Cave, forward for the Edmonton Oilers. He was 25. According to the reports, he had emergency surgery on Monday and was placed in a medically induced coma.

I am seeing unconfirmed reports that John Horton Conway, noted mathematician, has passed on, but I don’t have any links or anything that I’d consider confirmation yet.

Posted in Geek, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

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