NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
Miami
Cincinnati
Pittsburgh
Denver
Washington
I’m liking the Jets and Dolphins chances, but it is still early.
It looks like the baseball season is still going on, so next week’s loser update may include some commentary. I don’t think there’s a historically bad team this year, but Detroit could come close.
We watched the original “Night Stalker” Saturday night.
(Hi, Pat!)
That KL Studio Classics blu-ray is pretty awesome: the remaster is sharp and amazingly vivid. (I didn’t see “Night Stalker” when it was originally aired: I was (mumble mumble) years old and my parents wouldn’t let me watch it. This is actually the first time I’ve seen it, but my basis for comparison is the DVD of the TV series and the MeTV rebroadcasts: both seem a little muddy. If KL does a remaster of the series, I am there, man. And I plan to pick up the “Night Strangler” sooner rather than later now.)
The blu-ray also includes some good extras, including an interview with the director, John Llewellyn Moxey (who passed away in April of this year, at 94. I don’t recall seeing his obit reported.)
Anyway, Mr. Moxey was a prolific TV director: his credits include ten episodes of “Mannix”…
…including “End Game“, one of several episodes involving an old Army buddy of Mannix that’s out to get him…(“End Game” is a pretty tense and solid episode: it seems to show up a lot on the top ten episode lists I’ve seen.)
…and “A Ticket to the Eclipse“, another episode featuring an old Army buddy of Mannix that’s out to get him…
…and this time, the old Army buddy is played by none other than Darren McGavin his own self.
Just one of those curious connections that pop up sometimes. (Mr. Moxey seems to imply in his interview that he and Mr. McGavin didn’t know each other well, but they (and their wives) became close friends during the “Night Stalker” filming. Which is odd, because “A Ticket to the Eclipse” aired September 19, 1970, while “Night Stalker” aired January 11, 1972. So “Ticket” was probably filmed at least a year before “Night Stalker”. But, you know, maybe it took filming on location in Las Vegas to make them friends.)
(Lawrence: “Everyone in this movie looks hot.”)
Christopher Rouse, Pulitzer prize winning contemporary composer. I confess that I don’t know very much about his work, but he was a favorite of several close friends of mine.
(Edited to add: NYT obit.)
Davo Karnicar, a man who skied down Everest. He wasn’t “The Man Who Skied Down Everest” in the documentary (that was Yūichirō Miura, who is still alive at 86), but he skied non-stop from the summit to base camp – a 12,000 foot descent in four hours and 40 minutes. (Mr. Miura only descended 4,000 feet.)
His brother Andrej lost eight toes to frostbite during their descent on Annapurna in 1995. A year later, Davo lost two fingers to frostbite during a storm that killed eight climbers — a disaster detailed by Jon Krakauer in his book “Into Thin Air.”
And in 1997, Karnicar’s brother Luka and four other members of his rescue team died when a safety line connected to a helicopter broke during a training exercise.
…
According to the NYT obit, Mr. Karnicar was killed in a tree cutting accident at his home.
John L. Keenan, chief of detectives with the NYPD. He was most famous for leading the manhunt for the “Son of Sam”. There’s also an interesting historical side note:
…
When Chief Keenan was honored at a retirement party at Antun’s restaurant in Queens in the summer of 1978, Mr. Salinger came down from his home in rural New Hampshire, where he zealously guarded his privacy, to join in the tribute.
Departing from the focus on police work, which had attracted some 300 officers to the party, Mr. Salinger told the crowd that Chief Keenan had been “a great comfort,” especially in a foxhole.
Andy Green out as manager of the San Diego Padres. 274-366 over basically four years, during which the team never finished above .500. And they lost at least 90 games in the first three seasons. (They’re 69-85 right now.) ESPN.
Obit: Barron Hilton, son of Conrad Hilton, grandfather of Paris, and last survivor of the original AFL team owners. Sadly, the team he owned was the worthless Los Angeles (at the time) Chargers, but that was hardly his fault.
Marko Feingold. He was Austria’s oldest survivor of the Holocaust, and died at 106.
New York Post at its very best pic.twitter.com/ZSNNXSvFMh
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) September 21, 2019
(Hattip on the Feingold and Green stories to Lawrence. Hattip on the de Blasio obit to Mike the Musicologist.)
Betty Corwin. I hadn’t heard of her until I read the NYT obit, but it seems like she was one of nature’s noblewomen.
Ms. Corwin founded the New York Public Library Theater on Film and Tape Archive.
The still-growing archive — which at last count held 8,127 recordings, including artist interviews and theater-related films and television programs — has long been a rich resource for artists, students and researchers.
When Audra McDonald was preparing to perform in “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” on Broadway this summer, she went to the library to watch the archive’s 1988 recording of the original Manhattan Theater Club production, starring Kathy Bates. The week that Mike Nichols died in 2014, he had an appointment to look at “Master Class,” a version of which he was planning to direct for HBO.
…
Sander Vanocur, noted TV journalist.
Amazing bit of reporting by Cokie Roberts that has stuck with me: Her discovery of a letter from Louisa Adams detailing how members of Congress left behind *40 pregnant mistresses* after the extra-long session of 1820, necessitating more orphanage space–> https://t.co/CW4XxBRhNQ pic.twitter.com/iIoWce5LN2
— Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) September 17, 2019
Phyllis Newman, actress.
Ms. Newman won a Tony in 1962 as best featured actress in a musical for “Subways Are for Sleeping,” whose book and lyrics were written by her husband, Adolph Green, and his regular collaborator, Betty Comden. In the show, Ms. Newman played a long-term resident of the Brunswick Arms who, to stave off eviction, has shut herself in her room, a role that required Ms. Newman to spend the play in an unusual costume.
“Her line is that she is sick,” Howard Taubman wrote of the character in his review in The New York Times, “and to prove it she wears a towel wrapped around her excellently appointed torso. The only addition to her costume all evening is a pair of black gloves.”
Both my mother and the paper of record tell me that she was also a fixture on a lot of 70s game shows and talk shows, but I don’t remember that.
Cokie Roberts obit will probably be tomorrow, to give the dust time to settle.
I brought in some cookies for the office yesterday.
The good news is: Choco Leibniz are fairly cheap on Amazon with prime shipping.
Bad news 1: that package is pretty small.
Bad news 2: Amazon stuffed the package into my mailbox, where it sat in the Texas heat for several hours until I got home, causing the Choco in the Choco Leibniz to melt. If I do this again, I’m either going to have to find a local gourmet store that stocks them, or wait until winter in Texas, when the temperature drops below 90 degrees.
(Callback.)
Well, things are shaping up. The Jets are using a practice squad quarterback as their starter, Pittsburgh lost their starting quarterback for the season, the Saints lost theirs for six weeks…and the Browns won. Even with the Browns winning, I’m excited about the prospects for an 0-16 team this year.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
Miami
Cincinnati
Pittsburgh
Jacksonville
Denver
Washington
New York Football Giants
Carolina
Ric Ocasek, co-founder of The Cars and a good Cleveland boy.
Anne Rivers Siddons, novelist. She was one of those writers I’d heard of, and about, but I’ve never read any of her books.
T. Boone Pickens. Oklahoma State football hardest hit.
Diet Eman has passed away at 99.
Ms. Eman, at 20, was living with her parents and bicycling to work at the Twentsche Bank in The Hague when, in May 1940, the Germans, hours after Hitler had vowed to respect Dutch neutrality, invaded the Netherlands. Her sister’s fiancé was killed on the first of five days of fighting. (A brother died later in a Japanese prison camp.)
Some of her neighbors, fellow churchgoers, argued that for whatever reason, God in his wisdom must have willed the German invasion. But Ms. Eman — herself so deeply religious that she would leave assassinations, sabotage and, for the most part, even lying to others — could find no justification for such evil.
She and her boyfriend, Hein Seitsma, joined a Resistance group (coincidentally called HEIN, an acronym translated as “Help each other in need”). They began by spreading news received on clandestine radios from the British Broadcasting Corporation, then smuggling downed Allied pilots to England, either by boat across the North Sea or more circuitously through Portugal.
…
A plea for help by Herman van Zuidan, a Jewish co-worker of Ms. Eman’s at the bank, prompted her Resistance group to focus on stealing food and gas ration cards, forging identity papers and sheltering hundreds of fugitive Jews.
She said of the German occupiers, “It was beyond their comprehension that we would risk so much for the Jews.”
Ms. Eman delivered supplies and moral support to one apartment in The Hague that in late 1942 housed 27 Jews in hiding. The walls were paper thin. Crying babies and even toilet flushing risked raising the suspicions of neighbors, who knew only that a woman had been living there alone.
Ms. Eman was captured at one point and briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp: she managed to convince the Germans she was an innocent housemaid who knew nothing. Her fiance was also captured and was killed at Dachau.
It has been a bad week for photographers.
Robert Frank, noted for “The Americans”.
“The Americans” challenged the presiding midcentury formula for photojournalism, defined by sharp, well-lighted, classically composed pictures, whether of the battlefront, the homespun American heartland or movie stars at leisure. Mr. Frank’s photographs — of lone individuals, teenage couples, groups at funerals and odd spoors of cultural life — were cinematic, immediate, off-kilter and grainy, like early television transmissions of the period. They would secure his place in photography’s pantheon. The cultural critic Janet Malcolm called him the “Manet of the new photography.”
But recognition was by no means immediate. The pictures were initially considered warped, smudgy, bitter. Popular Photography magazine complained about their “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness.” Mr. Frank, the magazine said, was “a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption.”
Neil Montanus. He worked in several different areas of photography, including underwater and microscopic. But he was perhaps most famous as one of Kodak’s leading “Colorama” photographers: he took 55 out of the 565 photos, which were displayed in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal between 1950 and 1990.
I kind of wish “On Taking Pictures” was still doing new shows, as I figure Jeffery Saddoris and Bill Wadman would have a lot to say about these two.
Finally: Daniel Johnston, singer/songwriter and Austin icon. Don’t have much to say: for me, he fell into the same category as Roky Erickson.
Welcome back, folks. Another year, another tie in the first game of the season, which means that the Lions and Cardinals (per our policy) are out of 0-16 contention.
Fortunately, there are a couple of teams that we think have a good shot at going all the way this year. In honor of the late great Manhattan Infidel, though, we plan to avoid jokes and snark at the expense of the Giants. Well, mostly.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
da Bears
New York Jets
Miami
Cincinnati
Cleveland
Pittsburgh
Houston
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Denver
Washington
New York Football Giants
Carolina
Atlanta
Tampa Bay
Carol Lynley, actress.
The paper of record seems rather dismissive of her acting career post 1967 or thereabouts (“..she was never directly in the public eye again”) but she did a lot of guest shots on various 1970s TV: “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “Kojack”, “Quincy M.E”, “Police Woman”, “Hawaii 5-0”, multiple appearances on “Fantasy Island”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, and the list goes on…
…and she was Kolchak’s girlfriend in “The Night Stalker”…
…and, yes, she did do a “Mannix” (“Voice In the Dark”).
Sharing the same riff with other folks, but: Robert Mugabe is burning in Hell.
Unemployment exceeded 80 percent. At one point, inflation ran at an almost incomprehensible 230 million percent: When a bank note with a face value of 10 trillion dollars was introduced in early 2009, it was worth only about $8 on the black market. Zimbabwe’s money became so worthless that it was effectively replaced by outside currencies, including the South African rand, the United States dollar and China’s yuan.
Mr. Mugabe morphed into a caricature of dictatorship: vain and capricious, encircled by the flashy spending of his second wife and other family members, who lived in luxury at home and went on shopping sprees and long annual vacations in the Far East. (That wife, the former Grace Marufu, had been his secretary and mistress, and Mr. Mugabe, despite a strict Roman Catholic upbringing, fathered two children with her while still married to his first wife, Sally Hayfron.)
…
Starting around 2000, Mr. Mugabe’s lieutenants sent squads of young men to invade hundreds of white-owned farms and chase away their owners. The campaign took a huge toll.
Over two years, nearly all of the country’s white-owned land had been redistributed to about 300,000 black families, among them 50,000 aspiring black commercial farmers and many of Mr. Mugabe’s loyalists. By late 2002, only about 600 of the country’s 4,500 white farmers had kept parts of their land.
The violent agricultural revolution had come with a heavy price: The economy was collapsing as farmland fell into disuse and peasant farmers struggled to grow crops without fertilizer, irrigation, farm equipment, money or seeds. Food shortages, at first ascribed to drought, only worsened as farmers were forced to stop farming. When food aid arrived, people who had opposed Mr. Mugabe said government officials had denied them handouts to punish them.
Half-Price Books is having a 20% off sale over the long holiday weekend.
I haven’t found a lot of good stuff at the past few sales, but that didn’t stop me from going. And I think I see a break in the drought. I found some non-firearms related stuff:
I wouldn’t be posting, though, if I hadn’t gotten lucky and found some gun books. Which I will put after the jump…