Farley Mowat, perhaps most famous for his book Never Cry Wolf
Obit watch: May 9, 2014.
May 9th, 2014Even more things I didn’t know.
May 8th, 2014A comment by Guffaw in an earlier thread led me to Wikipedia, where I learned:
- There is a Jim Steinman Wiki.
- Jim Steinman was intimately involved in Batman: The Musical. Yes, you did read that correctly, and no, it was never produced.
- The Jim Steinman Wiki does not currently have an article about Dance of the Vampires. However, Wikipedia does:
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#12 in a series)
May 8th, 2014Heh. Heh. Heh. The charity in question was “New York 4 Life”, which the paper of record describes as an “anti-obesity charity”.
On an unrelated note: former State Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin had his prison term reduced from ten years to six. I enjoy the NYT lead:
He stole from the Little League? He took money from kids? Why reduce his sentence?
Answer: because he flipped.
Obit watch: May 8, 2014.
May 8th, 2014Bill Dana, legendary NASA test pilot.
That “sleek, black aircraft” was the X-15. Dana earned astronaut wings for two of his X-15 flights.
Hooray for Bollywood!
May 7th, 2014I haven’t paid much attention to Nate Silver or fivethirtyeight.com, but this story (by way of the Y Combinator Twitter) pushes a couple of buttons.
What’s the worst movie ever, according to IMDB? Not “Exterminator City“, Lawrence. IMDB’s bottom ranked movie is something called “Gunday“, which David Goldenberg describes as “a pretty silly, over-the-top Bollywood action flick about gun couriers that features a love triangle and lots of comical misunderstandings typical to the genre“.
Is it that bad? 1.4 bad? Worse than “The Hottie and the Nottie” bad?
(The RogerEbert.com review was written by Danny Bowes, for what it may be worth.)
So, if mainstream critics don’t think “Gunday” is so bad, how did it end up at the bottom of the IMDB rankings?
One word: crowd-sourcing.
Two words: Gonojagoron Moncho.
What? Gonojagoron Moncho is a “Bangladeshi nationalist movement” (the name translates to “National Awakening Stage”) that got very offended by “Gunday”. Specifically, they object to “Gunday”‘s depiction of the “Bangladesh Liberation War”:
So “Gunday”‘s low ranking is the result of a concerted political campaign, not because it actually is a crappy movie. And what does IMDB say about this?
Notes from the legal beat: May 7, 2014.
May 7th, 2014Hand to God, I thought this was a joke at first: Bernie Tiede, who killed his “long-time companion” Marjorie Nugent and inspired Richard Linklater’s movie “Bernie”, has been freed from prison.
In other news:
And who was the “now discredited homicide detective”? Louis Scarcella. (I’m starting to think I need a “Scarcella” sub-category. And maybe an NYPD one as well.)
We’ve got questions.
May 4th, 2014Over at the other blog:
Obit watch: May 3, 2014.
May 3rd, 2014Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (Edited to add: NYT obit.)
I was five months old when it first aired, and nine years old when it went off the air, so the show is kind of at the fringes of my memory. But I remember thinking “The F.B.I.” was a swell show.
And, of course, it was a Quinn Martin production.
Obit watch: May 2, 2014.
May 2nd, 2014The NYT is reporting the death of Walter R. Walsh on Tuesday at the age of 106.
I linked to the American Rifleman‘s profile of Mr. Walsh some time ago. That article is still up, and I commend it to your attention.
On Oct. 12, 1937, Mr. Walsh was in the sporting goods store Dakin’s in Bangor, Me., posing as a gun sales clerk and waiting for Public Enemy No. 1, Alfred Brady, and two gunmen, James Dalhover and Clarence Lee Shaffer.
Wanted for four murders, 200 robberies and a prison breakout, they had been in the store days earlier and were returning for Thompson submachine guns. But a large force of federal agents and state and local police officers were waiting in ambush, hidden in cars, storefronts and offices across the street.
The gang’s car drew up at 8:30 a.m. Dalhover got out and entered the store. He was immediately seized and disarmed by Mr. Walsh and taken to the back by other agents. Shaffer and Brady, sensing something was wrong, emerged with guns drawn.
Mr. Walsh, meanwhile, approached the store’s front with a .45 in his right hand and a .357 Magnum in his left. But as he reached the door he realized he was looking through the plate glass at Shaffer. The glass exploded as both men fired simultaneously.
Shaffer fell, mortally wounded, to the sidewalk. Mr. Walsh, although hit in the chest, shoulder and right hand, stepped outside firing his Magnum at Brady, who was cut down in a thundering fusillade from all sides as he shot back wildly. Witnesses said he was still moving as Mr. Walsh put another bullet in him.
Edited to add: tribute from the American Rifleman.
Random notes: May 1, 2014.
May 1st, 2014Hooray, hooray, the first of May!
Happy Victims of Communism Day, everyone.
My first encounter with Bob Hoskins wasn’t “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” or “Super Mario Brothers”. I encountered him through Siskel, Ebert, and a low-budget crime film that nearly didn’t get a theatrical release:
I’m going to have to watch that again, soon. (The Criterion edition
Also among the dead: Al Feldstein, who made Mad what it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
Quote of the day.
April 29th, 2014Oh dear god, they have half-lives for the unstable elements.
–one of my cow orkers, in reference to this.
Banana republicans watch: April 29, 2014.
April 29th, 2014So what?
Mr. Piquette is a deputy with the LA County Sheriff’s Office.
Mr. Piquette also has admitted to possessing a shotgun “that had been stolen from the Sheriff’s Department” and “three assault weapons that are banned under California law”.
Really? There’s a lot of short barreled ARs on the streets of LA? I’d love to see some evidence of that.
Then again, given that this is the “first plea agreement by one of 20 sheriff’s officials charged or indicted since December”, Hedding may be right, and the “criminals” who are carrying these types of weapons on the street work for the LA County Sheriff.
Random notes, some administrative, for April 23, 2014.
April 23rd, 2014Apologies for the extended radio silence. The past few days have been busy.
As many of the Whipped Cream Irregulars know, Sunday was my birthday, as well as Easter. This will not happen again until 2025.
Anyway, Mike the Musicologist came up late Friday night, rented a Silvercar, and we drove down to San Antonio on Saturday to do some gun shopping, tour Ranger Creek (which will be the subject of another post), and have dinner with Andrew and Lawrence at Bohanan’s (which may be the subject of another post).
I spent Easter Sunday with family, eating an excellent ham from the Noble Pig and a very good cake baked by my sister. (I don’t remember which cookbook she got the recipe from, but I thought it was very good; perhaps she’ll post here and update.)
Then on Monday, MtM and I took the Silvercar to Dallas, where we did some more gun shopping (including a stop at Cabela’s, but not that one), had a very good lunch at Chop House Burgers, and did some shopping for tacky souvenirs of pre-revolutionary America at the 6th Floor Museum shop.
So Saturday through Monday were jam packed. (For the record, I did not buy any guns. Though I was really tempted by the Sig Sauer 1911 22 at GrabAGun. I was also tempted at one of the San Antonio gun stores that had a couple of Nylon 66s, but I just can’t bring myself to pay $350 for one, even if it did have a scope.)
(Edited to add: Also, $1,300 for a K-22, even if it was an early post-war gun with the box, seems really really high.)
Anyway, I’m back and trying to get caught up on blogging. Profuse thanks to MtM for organizing the weekend.
Márquez.
April 18th, 2014NYT. Tribute from Michiko Kakutani.
LAT.
WP. WP original 1970 review of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Edited to add: “Love in the Time of Cholera: why it’s a bad title“.
Funny thing: I’ve never read any of Márquez’s work. I have One Hundred Years of Solitude
I actually went by one of the Half-Price Books locations last night looking for Márquez’s works. They had nothing. Nada. Zero. Surprising: I would have figured they’d have some copies of Love or Solitude at least.
Books in brief: The Power Broker.
April 17th, 2014This won’t be a review. Reviewing The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
These are a few random thoughts:
1. The Power Broker deserves all the acclaim it has gotten. Caro’s a great writer, and the story of the rise (and eventual fall) of Robert Moses is a compelling one. I kind of expected it to be slow moving and a little dull; how do you make urban planning interesting? But Caro found a way to do that. I got caught up in the sweep of the book, and found myself wanting to read more about Al Smith and La Guardia and other background characters.
There are a few places where I have reservations about Caro’s conclusions. The largest reservation I have is Caro’s emphasis on mass transit, and Moses’ failures in that regard. I’m not as much of a believer in mass transit as Caro seems to be, but I’m willing to concede Caro might be right. Given the population density (both at the time and projected for the future) mass transit may have been the only workable alternative for NYC’s traffic problems.
2. I haven’t read Caro’s LBJ books. I’m waiting for the series to be completed before I start on them. (I have read excerpts from them in other places.) But I wonder if Caro is drawn to people who were, in some way, corrupted by power. I have the impression that this is a theme in the LBJ books. And as for The Power Broker…
3. You know that quote attributed to Dave Barry? “Someone who is nice to you, but rude to the waitress, is not a nice person?” Robert Moses was a walking example of that. He was an elitist who believed that he and people like him – rich, Ivy League educated – were the only ones who were fit to govern, and everyone else should just get out of the way. He was a racist – he didn’t want the “lower classes” (read: blacks and the poor) using his parks, pools and playgrounds. He treated anyone he considered an inferior like dirt. As for the powerful, his main interest in them was how he could use them to enhance his own power. He destroyed vital and interesting neighborhoods for the sake of new roads, even though those neighborhoods could have been saved by small changes in routes (but those changes would have inconvenienced politicians who were important to Moses). And the new roads and bridges he built were full as soon as they were completed, which Moses saw as a reason to build more. Lather, rinse, repeat. We’re too close to Easter for me to say what I’m really thinking, but you can probably guess.
4. This shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did: there was (is?) a recent Robert Moses revisionist movement. The central thesis seems to be: yes, he was every bit as big a you-know-what as Caro portrayed him. But. He. Got. Things. Done. And “If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?“