Obit watch: July 24, 2019.

July 24th, 2019

Art Neville, of the Neville Brothers.

Among those announcing the death was Louisiana’s governor, John Bel Edwards, who said in a statement that Mr. Neville “took the unique sound of New Orleans and played it for the world to enjoy.” Mr. Neville’s brother Aaron, in a post on his Facebook page, called him “the patriarch of the Neville tribe, big chief, a legend from way way back, my first inspiration.”

David Hedison, who had an interesting career. He played Felix Leiter in two Bond films, was pretty fly for a white guy in the 1958 “The Fly”, was in “The Lost World”, and turned down Robert Reed’s role in “The Brady Bunch”.

He was most famous as the submarine captain (opposite Richard Basehart’s admiral) in “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” (which you can still catch very early Sunday morning on ME TV). He also did some soaps, “Love Boat”, and “Fantasy Island”.

Oddly, from my point of view, he apparently never did a “Mannix”, though he did do other 70s cop shows. Both Mr. Hedison and Mike Connors were of Armenian descent: I’m sure he didn’t directly control the casting, but you’d figure Mr. Connors would want to help a brother out.

I don’t want to seem obsessed, but I thought this tribute from Stephen Wolfram to the late Mitchell Feigenbaum was worth sharing, especially since it gives a good explanation of the math behind his work.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

It’s Baltimore, gentlemen.

July 23rd, 2019

The gods will not save you from being mugged. Even if you are a police.

(Hattip: Dean Bradley on the Twitters.)

Posted in Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 23, 2019.

July 23rd, 2019

Christopher Kraft, NASA flight director and legend.

For 25 years, from the dawn of the space age in the 1950s to the threshold of almost routine launchings in the 1980s, Mr. Kraft played crucial roles in the space program. He devised the protocols for exploration beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, orchestrated early orbital missions and spacewalks, and developed projects that put astronauts on the moon and into the first reusable space shuttles.
Aside from the astronauts who made history — including Alan B. Shepard Jr., with his suborbital flight; John Glenn, in orbiting the Earth; and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first to land on the lunar surface — Mr. Kraft was the most familiar face of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s early years, the steady ground commander who often explained missions to a rapt world at news conferences.
In an era of perilous experiments hastened by the Soviet success of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, Mr. Kraft presided over triumphal breakthroughs in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects. He also stood by helplessly when a fire killed three astronauts on a launchpad in 1967, but he helped devise the ingenious plan that saved the Apollo 13 crew after an explosion crippled their spacecraft en route to the moon in 1970.
At a time when there were no rules or procedures for space travel, Mr. Kraft, a brilliant aeronautical engineer, virtually wrote the book for NASA. He originated the concept of mission control, with authority vested in a ground-based flight director, not in a pilot-astronaut soaring through space at 7 miles a second who might be overwhelmed by pressures, especially during launch or re-entry.

NASA. I think this is a great story:

With the advent of the jet age of the 1950s, he was assigned as project engineer on flight tests of the Navy’s high-priority Vought F8U Crusader, which was exhibiting numerous birthing problems in its earliest versions. The problems uncovered by Langley flight tests included unacceptable g-force control behavior during maneuvers, which was determined to result from unintentional pivoting of the unique movable wing used by the configuration. Working with Langley test pilot Jack Reeder, Kraft identified the structural source of the problem, and took on the unpleasant job of telling the Navy that its new first-line aircraft was potentially dangerous. His warnings were heeded by Navy management, resulting in grounding of the F8U fleet, much to the chagrin of many operators of the new aircraft. He then encountered one of the most contentious members of the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, who questioned the Langley results and doubted the conclusions drawn by the NACA. That Marine Major was named John Glenn. Following a detailed examination of the Langley study results with Kraft and Reeder, and interviews with Navy pilots who flew the aircraft, Glenn was convinced and became a believer. The F8U was subsequently redesigned, as recommended by Kraft and his associates at Langley, and served the nation as an outstanding fighter during the Vietnam War.

Houston Chronicle.

In an interview in February with the Houston Chronicle, Kraft said he never wanted to be an astronaut.
“I liked my job better than theirs,” he said. “I got to go on every flight, and besides that, I got to tell them what to do.”

Edited to add: I don’t like linking to Ars Technica, but I’m making an exception in this case: Eric Berger, the author of their Chris Kraft obit, was also a personal friend of Mr. Kraft.

Every few months, I would make a pilgrimage to Kraft’s home, and we fell into a routine. We’d be seated upstairs in reclining leather chairs. Kraft would ask what I had been hearing about the space program. Then it was open season: I could ask anything I wanted, from his experiences at Virginia Tech and his early years of NASA, about which astronauts he had liked—and which he hadn’t—to his thoughts on current affairs at NASA. Somewhere along the way, Betty Anne would bring us glasses of Coca-Cola with ice.

Posted in History, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Pop quiz, hotshot.

July 22nd, 2019

Is this headline from The Babylon Bee or the New York Times?

How ‘The Lion King’ Gets Real-Life Lion Family Dynamics Wrong

Answer after the jump. No fair playing if you already know the answer…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Mammals, Media, Movies, Sarcasm | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 22, 2019.

July 22nd, 2019

Paul Krassner, Yippee.

…so naturally irreverent was Mr. Krassner that when People magazine labeled him the “father of the underground press,” he demanded a paternity test.

…

Mr. Krassner was writing freelance pieces for Mad magazine in 1958 when he realized that there was no equivalent satirical publication for adults; Mad, he could see, was largely targeted at teenagers. So he started The Realist out of the Mad offices, and it began regular monthly publication. By 1967 its circulation had peaked at 100,000.
“I had no role models and no competition, just an open field mined with taboos waiting to be exploded,” Mr. Krassner wrote in his autobiography.
The magazine’s most famous cartoon was one, drawn in 1967 by the Mad artist Wally Wood, of an orgy featuring Snow White, Donald Duck and a bevy of Disney characters enjoying a variety of sexual positions. (Mickey Mouse is shown shooting heroin.) Later, digitally colored by a former Disney artist, it became a hot-selling poster that supplied Mr. Krassner with modest royalties into old age.

Robert M. Morgenthau, former Manhattan DA and federal prosecutor.

Noted:

Mr. Morgenthau had been in the Naval Reserve in college, and after graduation he went on active duty as an ensign. He passed his physical exam by concealing the near-deafness in his right ear from a boyhood mastoid infection. An officer aboard three destroyers and a minesweeper during World War II, he survived enemy attacks and won decorations for bravery under fire.
His destroyer, the U.S.S. Lansdale, was attacked by Nazi torpedo bombers in the Mediterranean off Algiers on April 20, 1944. Cut by explosions, the ship went down with a heavy loss of life. Lieutenant Morgenthau, the executive officer, saved several shipmates, leapt into the water and swam for three hours in the darkness until he and others were picked up by an American warship. In 1945 his ship, the U.S.S. Harry F. Bauer, was hit by a Japanese kamikaze plane off Iwo Jima, but its 550-pound bomb did not explode.

Posted in History, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 20, 2019.

July 20th, 2019

NYT obit for Dr. Mitchell Feigenbaum. (Previously.)

L. Bruce Laingen. He was the senior diplomat in Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis, and was taken hostage.

Mr. Laingen and two aides who had been with him at the ministry remained separated from the other hostages during the long ordeal, Mr. Laingen having the odd role of continuing to act as a diplomat while being a hostage. He was a point of contact to the outside world, sometimes meeting with diplomats from other countries and even occasionally being allowed a phone call with the West.
But if he had a somewhat easier time than the hostages at the embassy, he in no way soft-pedaled his experience. In 2001, when a conservative faction in Iran set up an anti-American exhibition on the grounds of the former embassy, Mr. Laingen, in a letter to the editor printed in The Times, suggested that the site needed a plaque. He proposed this wording:
“Here is the former American Embassy in Tehran, where occurred the most egregious violation in recorded history of all standards and precepts of diplomacy: the seizure of an embassy and its staff by student terrorists, an act endorsed by their government, the hostages used as pawns for 444 days to further the political purposes of the Islamic Republic.”

…

“We are there to find out how people are thinking and why they are thinking that way and behaving that way,” he said in the oral history. “And if we get too comfortable in believing something that sort of fits our purposes, well, we are in hellish trouble.”

Posted in History, Obits, Physics | Comments Closed

Non historical note, not suitable for use in schools.

July 20th, 2019

I bow to nobody as far as my interest in the space program goes.

But I don’t have a darn thing to say about Apollo 11, or the 50th anniversary of same. This just feels like one of those big round number anniversaries where everybody is on top of it, everything that can be said has already been said, and there’s nothing left.

If you want something, go over to Lawrence’s.

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

I am large, I contain multitudes.

July 19th, 2019

This year’s S&WCA Symposium made me realize that I’m dealing with a contradiction.

On the one hand, I’m fond of big-bore revolvers. I’m especially drawn these days to blued 4″ guns, like the Wolf and Klar revolvers, mostly because I have several 6″ examples. But I wouldn’t turn my nose up at something like this, either. (The gunshop near me had a 4″ Mountain Gun in .45 Colt for a long while that I was seriously considering pulling the trigger on. But I think it finally got sold to someone who wasn’t me.)

I think a nice blued big bore 4″ gun, with a good looking holster, would make a fine barbecue gun. Put some good looking grips on it (perhaps real vintage ivory if I can find it), maybe get some tasteful engraving done when I can afford it…

On the other hand, I’m also developing a fetish for small-bore handguns. I’m not talking .22 rimfire here: first off, I already have more than a few of those, and secondly, no man needs to apologize for or defend his collection of .22 rimfire handguns. There are very few things better than a nice .22 pistol: I think if I was limited to one revolver, I’d keep my Kit Gun.

No, what I’m talking about is the weird centerfire smallbore stuff. The XP-100 in .221 Remington Fireball. The .224 Harvey Kay-Chuck. And yes, I want to pick up a Model 53 in .22 Jet, even though I realize how impractical the Jet cartridge is, and I’d have to start handloading if I wanted to shoot it. (Though there is someone who makes the rounds of the gunshows selling remanufactured .22 Jet ammo.)

(And I probably need to start handloading anyway. For reasons.)

Even though I’m a Smith guy, the idea of a Blackhawk in .256 Winchester Magnum appeals, too.

If I ever win the lottery, I have a plan to commission the S&W Performance Center to build some Kit Guns based on the Model 51 frame, but chambered in .17 HMR. I just need to figure out if you can put enough of a twist in a 4″ barrel to stabilize the .17 round. If that works out, my next project would be to commission some X-frame revolvers in .221 Fireball. I wouldn’t do a whole lot of them: maybe ask them to build about 10 of each, give some to the family, and donate the others to the S&WCA auction.

I’m sure you’re all hoping I don’t win the lottery now.

(Subject line hattip.)

Posted in Guns | Comments Closed

Disappointment.

July 17th, 2019

I saw a post about the Kickstarter for Papillon and said to myself, “Man! What a cool idea!”

I’m not really into MMORPGs, but the idea of one where you could play a prisoner in a penal colony in French Guyana, dodging guards, forming alliances with other prisoners, struggling to survive solitary confinement, and plotting escape? I could get behind that.

Then I clicked through to the link. Apparently it has something to do with butterflies.

I like my idea better.

Posted in Geek | 1 Comment »

Not quite an obit…

July 17th, 2019

…not in the conventional sense, anyway. But I’ve been reading more James Lileks the past few days because…reasons.

Start here.

Posted in Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 17, 2019.

July 17th, 2019

John Paul Stevens. WP.

For the historical record, one of the most unambiguously incorrect statements ever made by a Supreme Court justice (sitting or former):

District of Columbia v. Heller, which recognized an individual right to possess a firearm under the Constitution, is unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Supreme Court announced during my tenure on the bench.

Edited to add: Reason 1. Reason 2.

Charles Levin. Apparently he was most famous for playing a mohel on an episode of “Seinfeld”, but he knocked around TV quite a bit before that. Never did a “Mannix”, but he did some other cop shows, was a regular on “Alice”, and was also in “This Is Spinal Tap”.

Posted in Law, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 16, 2019.

July 16th, 2019

Pernell Whitaker, champion boxer.

Whitaker lost his first chance at a championship in 1988, but he rebounded the next year to win the International Boxing Federation world lightweight title from Greg Haugen. He then beat Rafael Pineda for the I.B.F. super lightweight title in 1992 and Buddy McGirt for the World Boxing Council welterweight belt in early 1993.

He fought Julio Cesar Chavez to a draw, though “many observers” believed he’d won outright. He also fought Oscar De La Hoya, but lost the decision (even though he scored the only knockdown of the fight, and even though, again, most observers thought he outpunched De La Hoya).

ESPN.

Michael Seidenberg. This is one of those interesting obits for an otherwise obscure person: Mr. Seidenberg ran a “clandestine bookshop”.

No, not one that specialized in espionage and spy books:

Mr. Seidenberg plied his trade at book fairs and on sidewalks for some years. But around 2008, with the help of George Bisacca, a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he turned the book-stuffed apartment into a secret bookstore, open at select times or by appointment to friends and admirers. Sometimes a visitor might actually buy a book, but the place was more like a salon, with literary figures and book lovers mingling and sharing a drink at a bar stocked mostly with liquor contributed by patrons.

…

Mr. Seidenberg often described himself as a good book collector but a lousy bookseller.

Posted in Books, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Sorry.

July 15th, 2019

I totally missed Bastille Day. But Borepatch put up a nice post.

(And he’s right. I think that is one of the best scenes from “Casablanca”.)

In my defense, it was a hectic weekend. I was at an event most of the day on Saturday (from early in the morning to late in the afternoon), went from there to Half-Price Books, from there straight to the dining conspiracy, from there to Lawrence‘s for movies, and from there home around 2 AM.

Sunday afternoon, Mom and I went out for lunch: after that, I went to the gun show in Dripping Springs, came home, picked up Mom, and we went over to the big Half-Price on North Lamar.

The thing is, I noticed on the way over to Half-Price that I was really tired: I found myself starting to doze off in the car, which worried me. I got a bottle of water while we were there, which helped some, but when I came home, I went upstairs to lay down and slept from about 5 PM to 5 AM this morning.

Either I’m getting old, or something’s wrong.

Anyway, in case you haven’t guessed what with all the trips to Half-Price, this week was another coupon sale. Unfortunately, the pickings were really slim:

Especially when it came to gun books. The only really worthwhile thing I found was a copy of Helmer’s The Gun That Made the Twenties Roar for $12 (after 40% off coupon) plus tax.

Other than that: a blu-ray of “The Revenant”, which I missed in theaters and kind of wanted to see, for roughly $8 with a 20% off coupon, a copy of Boessenecker’s biography of Frank Hamer (which I’d been trying to find for a while, and got for $6), and Ben Macintyre’s book about Kim Philby. (I believe that was also about $6.)

Maybe next weekend I can catch up on sleep. And I have some gun porn I want to post, but I have to take the photos first.

Posted in Admin, Books, Guns, History, Movies | 2 Comments »

Historical note, suitable for use in schools.

July 12th, 2019

In keeping with our baseball theme, some lazy stupid blogging.

Actually, I wanted to pull together a longer post, but I’m all out of energy this week, plus I’ve posted on this subject before, so:

Ladies and Germans, today is the 40th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night.

“I thought these fans in Chicago were the best because they’re saying `Let’s go Sox! Let’s go Sox!’ ” Petry recalled last weekend at Comerica Park. “They were really chanting `Disco sucks! Disco sucks! Disco sucks!’”

There’s a book (co-written by Steve Dahl).

And the Sox commemorated the occasion before last night’s game, with Steve Dahl throwing out the first pitch.

Enough time has passed for the Sox to come to terms with Disco Demolition’s place in the team’s annals. They showed highlights of that night on the video board, including video of fans storming the field and damaging it so much the Sox had to forfeit the second game of that day’s doubleheader against the Tigers.
“It’s absolutely cool that it’s just part of the history, and not a shameful part of the history,” Dahl said. ‘It’s just something that happened, and honestly, it was just about the music.”

Posted in History, Hysteria, Music, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 11, 2019.

July 11th, 2019

I am not a musician or a musicologist. I have no talent for music, and I try to leave the musicology to Mike.

But there’s something about the obit for Vivian Perlis that I find touching and interesting. Back in the day, she was a research librarian at the Yale School of Music. She went to pick up some archival material from one of Charles Ives’s business partners.

Thinking that he might have some recollections to share, Ms. Perlis brought along a portable tape recorder. She was fascinated by the stories that Mr. Myrick, an elderly, hard-of-hearing former Southerner, told about the iconoclastic, curmudgeonly Ives.
This led her to conduct a series of more than 60 interviews over several years with people who had known and worked with Ives. A nephew in Danbury, Conn., Ives’s hometown, recounted playing baseball with “Uncle Charlie.” The composer Lehman Engel recalled hearing Ives talk about the “old days,” when the “sissies,” meaning timidly conservative performers, refused to play Ives’s flinty music.

This was the seed crystal from which grew the Yale University Oral History of American Music.

The oral history project includes some 3,000 recordings of interviews with composers and other major musical figures, from Aaron Copland to Elliott Carter, from Duke Ellington to John Adams. The eminent musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock described it as an “incomparable resource.”

…

“Most composers are part of a neglected minority and are very grateful to have the opportunity to speak,” she told The Times in 2005. “They don’t have another chance to answer critics and say what they think and feel.”

Also among the dead: Jim Bouton. WP (and a tip of the hat to Borepatch for the heads-up.) He was a pitcher with several teams (Yankees, Seattle Pilots, and even the Astros). Apparently, he was not an outstanding pitcher (the paper of record uses the phrase “a pitcher of modest achievement but a celebrated iconoclast”).
He went on to greater fame as the author of Ball Four, one of the early “inside baseball” books.

When it was published in 1970, “Ball Four,” which reported on the selfishness, dopiness, childishness and meanspiritedness of young men often lionized for playing a boy’s game very well, was viewed by many readers, either approvingly or not, as a scandalous betrayal of the so-called sanctity of the clubhouse.

…

In Bouton’s telling, players routinely cheated on their wives on road trips, devised intricate plans to peek under women’s skirts or spy on them through hotel windows, spoke in casual vulgarities, drank to excess and swallowed amphetamines as if they were M&Ms.
Mickey Mantle played hung over and was cruel to children seeking his autograph, he wrote. Carl Yastrzemski was a loafer. Whitey Ford illicitly scuffed or muddied the baseball and his catcher, Elston Howard, helped him do it. Most coaches were knotheads who dispensed the obvious as wisdom when they weren’t contradicting themselves, and general managers were astonishingly penurious and dishonest in dealing with players over their contracts.

…

“Ball Four” is “arguably the most influential baseball book ever written,” baseball historian Terry Cannon told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2005, “and one which changed the face of sportswriting and our conception of what it means to be a professional athlete.”
Sports Illustrated named it the third-best book written on sports, after A.J. Liebling’s “The Sweet Science,” about boxing, and Roger Kahn’s elegy to the Brooklyn Dodgers, “The Boys of Summer.”

I’ve never read Ball Four, though I’ve heard it described as sceamingly funny. But the obits make it sound like the book is as much about a man struggling to hold on to his dream of being a major league pitcher as much as it is a tell-all about the wild antics of players in the late 60s – early 70s.

“I feel sorry for Jim Bouton,” Dick Young wrote in The Daily News. “He is a social leper. His collaborator on the book, Leonard Shecter, is a social leper. People like this, embittered people, sit down in their time of deepest rejection and write. They write, oh hell, everybody stinks, everybody but me, and it makes them feel much better.”

As a side note, Mr. Bouton has a limited career as an actor: there was apparently a short-lived “Ball Four” TV series in 1976 that I don’t remember. He was also “Terry Lennox” in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye“, a movie you do not want to get me started on.

Edited to add 7/12: Wow. Neil deMause over at “Field of Schemes” has a really nice tribute to Mr. Bouton up.

The image I’ll always retain of Jim, though, was of getting ice cream with him near his home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and him looking at my cup and exclaiming, “Sprinkles! That’s a great idea!” and then sprinting back into the shop to get some added to his as well. To the end, Jim Bouton remained boyishly intense about things that were truly important, whether fighting General Electric to save an old ballpark or eating ice cream, and that’s a rare and precious gift.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 10, 2019.

July 10th, 2019

RIP Rip Torn. THR.

…As he once acknowledged, “I get angry easily.”
In what is probably the most famous example, in 1968 Mr. Torn was filming “Maidstone,” an underground film written and directed by Mailer. Mailer was also the star, playing a writer running for president. Mr. Torn played his half brother. In a decidedly unscripted moment, Mr. Torn struck Mailer with a hammer; Mailer responded by attacking Mr. Torn and biting his ear. The fight became the centerpiece of the film.

…

…Dennis Hopper told a story on “The Tonight Show” in 1994 about how Mr. Torn had pulled a knife on him during an argument in the 1960s. (It was apparently as a result of this argument that Jack Nicholson and not Mr. Torn was cast as the Southern lawyer in Mr. Hopper’s hit film “Easy Rider.”) The way Mr. Torn remembered it, Mr. Hopper had pulled a knife on him, not the other way around, so he sued for defamation. He won.

I’m probably being unfair by highlighting the more colorful aspects of his life. He was apparently a rather talented movie and theater actor, and a good Texas boy (born in Temple, went to both Texas A&M and UT). For some reason, I keep thinking he was on a lot of game shows when I was a kid: am I confusing him with someone else? (I know I’m not confusing Rip Torn and Charles Nelson Reilly.)

Eva Kor.

Ms. Kor took young people on annual summer tours of Auschwitz. While conducting a tour, she died on Thursday at 85 at a hotel in Krakow, Poland, near the site of the former death camp. It was there that she and her twin, Miriam, had been among some 1,500 sets of twins who were victims of experiments, including the injections of germs, overseen by the German doctor Josef Mengele.

…

“Miriam and I were part of a group of children who were alive for one reason only — to be used as human guinea pigs,” she wrote. “Three times a week we’d be placed naked in a room, for six to eight hours, to be measured and studied.
“They took blood from one arm and gave us injections in the other. After one such injection I became very ill and was taken to the hospital. If I had died, Mengele would have given Miriam a lethal injection in order to do a double autopsy. When I didn’t die, he carried on experimenting with us and as a result Miriam’s kidneys stopped growing. They remained the size of a child’s all her life.”

…

Ms. Kor, who worked in real estate for many years, traveled to Germany in 1993 to meet with a former doctor at Auschwitz, Hans Münch, who had been acquitted of war crimes. He accepted her invitation to go to Auschwitz with her and sign a document acknowledging the existence of the camp’s gas chambers. On the 50th anniversary of its liberation, they stood together before the charred ruins of its crematories.
Ms. Kor composed a letter to Dr. Münch expressing her belief in forgiving tormentors, as a thank you for his gesture.
“Dr. Münch signed his document about the operation of the gas chambers while I read my document of forgiveness and signed it,” she recalled. “As I did that, I felt a burden of pain was lifted from me.”
“Some survivors do not want to let go of the pain,” she wrote in her Forgiveness Project remembrance. “They call me a traitor and accuse me of talking in their name. I have never done this. I do it for myself. I do it not because they deserve it, but because I deserve it.”

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Nazis, Obits, Theatre, TV | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: July 9, 2019.

July 9th, 2019

Ross Perot. (Edited to add: Lawrence. Dallas Morning News.)

He was no quitter: an Eagle Scout, a Navy officer out of Annapolis, a top I.B.M. salesman, the founder of wildly successful data processing enterprises, a crusader for education and against drugs, a billionaire philanthropist. In 1969, he became a kind of folk hero with a quixotic attempt to fly medicine and food to American prisoners of war in North Vietnam. In 1979 he staged a commando raid that freed two of his employees, and thousands of criminals and political prisoners, from captivity in revolutionary Iran.
And in 1992 he became one of the most unlikely candidates ever to run for president. He had never held public office, and he seemed all wrong, like a cartoon character sprung to life: an elfin 5 feet 6 inches and 144 pounds, with a 1950s crew cut; a squeaky, nasal country-boy twang; and ears that stuck out like Alfred E. Neuman’s on a Mad magazine cover. Stiff-necked, cantankerous, impetuous, often sentimental, he was given to homespun epigrams: “If you see a snake, just kill it. Don’t appoint a committee on snakes.”

…

He joined the Boy Scouts at 12 and in little more than a year was an Eagle Scout, an extraordinary achievement that became part of his striver’s legend.

…

His folk-patriot reputation stemmed from two adventures. In 1969, after months of speaking on the plight of 1,400 American prisoners of war in North Vietnam, he chartered two jetliners, filled them with 30 tons of food, medicines and gifts and flew to Southeast Asia. Hanoi rejected the mission, but it was hardly a failure. The spotlight on prisoners’ hardships embarrassed Hanoi and led to better treatment for some.
In 1979, as an Islamic revolution swept Iran, Mr. Perot mounted a commando raid on a prison in Tehran to free two employees being held for ransom. A riot was orchestrated at the gates, and in the chaos of an ensuing breakout 11,800 inmates escaped, including both employees. The episode was chronicled in Ken Follett’s best-selling book “On Wings of Eagles” and in a 1986 mini-series on NBC.

You know, I need to read that book. (Also The Pillars of the Earth.)

Also among the dead: Jack Renner, co-founder of Telarc and a good Cleveland boy.

In 1978 the company made what Mr. Renner said was the first commercially released digital recording of symphonic music in the United States, featuring Frederick Fennell and the Cleveland Symphonic Winds.
“It created a lot of stir among audiophiles,” he said. “It had a bass drum that blew up speakers. Everybody accused us of hyping the bass drum. We didn’t.”

Back in the day, I had a fair number of Telarc CDs (including some of their P.D.Q. Bach).

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#57 in a series)

July 8th, 2019

There’s an interesting article in today’s NYT about Jenna Garland, the former press secretary for Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed.

Ms. Garland is currently under indictment. She’s charged with two misdemeanors. But, unlike the usual run of tax-fattened hyenas, the charges against Ms. Garland involve…

…violations of the Georgia open records law.

One of the charges against Ms. Garland accuses her of attempting to frustrate a reporter’s 2017 request for billing documents from the city water department by telling a subordinate, in text messages, to “drag this out as long as possible” and “provide information in the most confusing format available.”

…

In one text message that later came to light, Ms. Garland advised a water department spokesperson to be “as unhelpful as possible.” In another, she told the spokesperson to “hold all” requested documents pertaining to certain members of the City Council until the reporter “asks for an update.”

There are two interesting things about this.

1. Criminal charges against public officials for open records act violations are “extremely uncommon”, as the paper of record describes it.

Open-records or “sunshine” laws in a number of other states include no criminal sanctions for noncompliance, although a number of them call for civil penalties or the payment of attorneys’ fees and court costs if a news organization or a member of the public successfully sues a government agency for documents.
In Colorado, lawmakers removed criminal penalties for violating the state’s open-records law two years ago because almost no one was ever charged.

2. “The case is perhaps the most notable fallout from an epic, extended public battle between Mr. Reed, a forceful personality and one of the most important African-American politicians in the South, and two titans of the Atlanta media scene: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and WSB-TV, the local ABC affiliate. The paper and TV station are owned by the same parent company and often team up for coverage.”

And something that’s feeding into this: even though Kasim Reed left office last year, his administration is still under federal investigation.

Federal agents have been scrutinizing construction contracts issued during Mr. Reed’s tenure, the use of city-issued credit cards, and concessions at the city’s international airport, among other matters. The federal investigation has resulted in numerous indictments.

It kind of sounds like the charges against Ms. Garland are more fallout from the ongoing investigation of Mr. Reed. I’d be tempted to suggest that they’re trying to flip her: but that seems unlikely with misdemeanor charges.

Scott R. Grubman, an Atlanta-based lawyer experienced in white-collar crime matters who is not involved in the Garland case, read Ms. Garland’s text messages the same way. He said he thought the government’s case against her was “flimsy” and an overreaction, given that civil penalties could be levied instead.
In Georgia, both state agencies and local governments “regularly engage in delay tactics” in response to open-records requests, Mr. Grubman said in an email. “By bringing a criminal prosecution against Ms. Garland without having ever criminally prosecuted any other violation in the past, the A.G.’s office appears to be unfairly targeting Ms. Garland and opening up a can of worms that will be difficult to close.”

I actually kind of agree with Mr. Grubman’s position, at least in part. This does seem like selective prosecution. But: I only agree with him in part because I think more public officials should face criminal charges for open records act violations. The heck with “civil penalties”, which are probably going to be paid by the taxpayers anyway: let’s hold these people personally responsible for violating the law. And if that means some of them wind up in jail…fiat justitia ruat caelum.

Posted in Law, Media, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 6, 2019.

July 6th, 2019

Dr. Mitchell Feigenbaum, theoretical physicist.

When Feigenbaum began his career in the early 1970s, the term “chaos theory” did not exist. Generations of scientists dating back to Isaac Newton had worked on problems related to the predictability of complex systems, such as the orbits of the planets in the solar system. By the middle of the 20th century, physicists and mathematicians—inspired by the pioneering work of the French physicist and mathematician Henri Poincaré—had succeeded in characterizing chaotic states, often enabled by computers, by framing such questions as geometric problems. But the boundary between regular and chaotic behavior remained fuzzy, particularly as it applied to real physical systems.
Feigenbaum stepped into this foggy arena, developing methods capable of computationally modelling the period-doubling transition to chaos, which proceeds in a series of geometrically focused steps that remain similar when scaled across orders of magnitude, an example of so-called fractal geometry. He first studied a simple iterated algebraic equation known as the logistic map, and was later able to demonstrate that these steps are “universal:” all physical systems that become chaotic via this period-doubling route to chaos exhibit the same behavior. Feigenbaum also found that this behavior is determined by two universal constants, now known as the Feigenbaum constants.

Gene Pingatore, Illinois high school basketball coach. He holds the state record for most wins, but is perhaps more famous as the coach in “Hoop Dreams”.

Mickey Kapp. No, I hadn’t heard of him before, either, but the story is interesting: he was the provider of mixtapes to the astronauts through the Gemini and Apollo programs.

And it all started with José Jiménez.

At Mr. Kapp’s urging, Mr. Dana booked an appearance at the Kings Inn in Cocoa Beach, Fla., near where the astronauts trained. He usually did the astronaut bit with a straight man acting as interviewer, but for Cocoa Beach he was working alone.
“A few minutes into the routine, a guy in the front row began yelling out the straight man’s lines,” Mr. Thompson wrote. It was Mr. Shepard, who joined Mr. Dana onstage but was laughing so hard that another Mercury astronaut, Wally Schirra, who was there, took over, followed by another, Deke Slayton.

Paul Benjamin, actor. He knocked around quite a bit from the 1970s through to 2016: never did a “Mannix”, but he was in various other 70s cop shows, “Escape From Alcatraz” and was one of the guys on the corner in “Do the Right Thing”.

Sid Ramin.

Mr. Ramin (pronounced RAY-min) was one of two orchestrators — three, if you count the contributions of the composer, Leonard Bernstein, a lifelong friend — on the original Broadway production of “West Side Story,” which opened in 1957. According to “The Sound of Broadway Music” (2009), by Steven Suskin, Mr. Ramin worked on the haunting ballad “Somewhere,” the evocative “Something’s Coming,” the sweetly comic “I Feel Pretty,” the bravado-of-youth anthem “Here Come the Jets” and the irreverent “Gee, Officer Krupke.”

…

Shows whose orchestrations he worked on, in addition to “West Side Story,” included “Gypsy” (1959), “I Can Get It for You Wholesale” (1962), “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1962), Bette Midler’s “Clams on the Half Shell Revue” (1975), “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” (1989) and “Crazy for You” (1992).

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Physics, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Woo! Chugga! BOOM!

July 5th, 2019

Bookmark:

“For 40 Years, Crashing Trains Was One of America’s Favorite Pastimes“.

I read a similar article some years ago in an Old Farmer’s Almanac, but haven’t been able to find it since, and people don’t believe me when I tell them about this.

Oh, they believe in the Great Crush Crash (which is given much love in this article), but people seem incredulous when you tell them staged locomotive crashes for crowds were a regular spectator event, and Crush wasn’t a one-off.

Connolly began to criss-cross the country putting on wrecks from Boston to Los Angeles, Tampa to Salt Lake City. According to Reisdorff, he also found ways to add to the spectacle, including strapping dynamite to the front of the locomotives and filling freight cars behind the engines with gasoline and hot coals so the vehicles would be engulfed in flames after they derailed. Connolly and other train wreckers also liked to paint names and phrases on the sides of the trains for different political candidates or causes so that spectators could cheer for their respective locomotive. One wreck in 1932 featured “Hoover” versus “Roosevelt.” Connolly got so proficient at putting on train wrecks that he allegedly even tried copyrighting it, although Reisdorff was unable to find proof that he ever actually filed the paperwork to do so.

Posted in Bookmarks, Trains | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 5, 2019.

July 5th, 2019

For the historical record: Arte Johnson, of “Laugh-In” fame.

His success on “Laugh-In” led to a half-hour special in 1971; stints hosting other programs, including the short-lived game show “Knockout;” and repeat appearances on series like “The Love Boat” and “General Hospital.” He voiced a character named Tyrone on the cartoon series “Baggypants and the Nitwits,” which also featured the voice of Ruth Buzzi, in 1977, and played Renfield in the vampire movie comedy “Love at First Bite,” with George Hamilton as Count Dracula, in 1979.

You know, I’d never even heard of “Baggypants and the Nitwits” until now…

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 3, 2019.

July 3rd, 2019

Lee Iacocca.

Max Wright. He has an interesting back story: Mr. Wright knocked around a lot in television, movies, and theater.

His other television credits include appearances on “Murphy Brown,” “Quantum Leap,” “Misfits of Science,” “Cheers,” “Buffalo Bill,” “Taxi” and “The Drew Carey Show.”
He also appeared in early episodes of “Friends” as the manager of Central Perk, the coffee shop where the show’s main characters hung out, and played Norm Macdonald’s boss on the ABC sitcom “Norm.” His film credits include “All That Jazz,” “Snow Falling on Cedars,” “Reds,” “The Sting II,” “Soul Man” and “The Shadow.”

…

On Broadway he was the Second Murderer in “Richard III,” starring Al Pacino, in 1979; a neurotic landlord in Jean Kerr’s “Lunch Hour” in 1980; and an accident-prone clerk in an Andrei Serban production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” in 1977…
He made his Broadway debut in 1968 in the original production of “The Great White Hope,” Howard Sackler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play based on the life of the heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson, which starred James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander. He earned a Tony nomination for best performance by a featured actor in a play for his role as Pavel Lebedev in the Chekhov play “Ivanov” in 1998, a performance that also earned him a nomination for a Drama Desk Award.
He performed Shakespeare regularly; one of his most noted roles was Sir Andrew Aguecheek in the Lincoln Center Theater production of “Twelfth Night” in 1998.

Sadly and tragically, he was best known as the father on “ALF”, one of the worst television series ever to pass across the small screen.

By the time the show’s four-year run ended in 1990, Mr. Wright told People magazine in 2000, “I was hugely eager to have it over with.” In fact, on the last day of filming, his colleagues told People, he grabbed his things and got into his car without even saying goodbye.

Lawrence sent over this THR obit for Milton Quon. Speaking of back story, wow: Mr. Quon was one of the Golden Age Disney animators (he worked on “Fantasia” and “Dumbo”).

The Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles presented a retrospective exhibit of his work in 2005; he was one of five artists featured in ” ‘Round the Clock: Chinese American Artists Working in Los Angeles” at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park, California, in 2012; and he received the Golden Spike Award from the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California in 2013.
And in 2017, he was featured in a father and son art exhibition in Red Bank, New Jersey, with his son Mike and in a solo exhibition at Santa Monica College’s Emeritus Gallery.

He also had a career as an actor and extra: he may have been best known as “the old Asian guy on the bus” in “Speed”. Mr. Quon was 105.

Posted in Cars, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 2, 2019.

July 2nd, 2019

Tyler Skaggs, pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels.

He was found dead in his hotel room a few hours before the Angels played the Texas Rangers. Mr. Skaggs was 27.

ESPN. I’d link to the Dallas Morning News, but they’re being really obnoxious.

No foul play is suspected, and an investigation is ongoing, police said.
A Southlake police spokesperson said it “is not suspected” that Skaggs took his own life, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Posted in Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#56 in a series)

June 30th, 2019

“This defendant is a walking crime-spree,” Michael Wheat, a special federal prosecutor, told the judge in court, saying she holds sway with police and has tampered with grand jury witnesses in the past.

Wow. “A walking crime-spree.” That’s pretty harsh. Who is the defendant?

Katherine Kealoha. She was a prosecutor in the Honolulu DA’s office. She is also married to the former Honolulu chief of police.

And both of them were convicted of consipracy and obstruction of justice on Friday. Also convicted: two officers with the Honolulu PD.

This whole case is kind of bat guano insane, and Hawaii is not my usual beat. So I didn’t find out about this story until yesterday, and completely missed any run-up to it. This particular set of convictions were the result of the Kealoha’s staging the theft of a mailbox. No, really. A mailbox.

The five defendants were accused of conspiring to frame Gerard Puana, Katherine Kealoha’s estranged uncle, for the alleged theft of the Kealohas’ Kahala mailbox in 2013 and then lying to federal authorities to cover their scheme.
Prosecutors said the Kealohas were trying to smear Puana and Katherine Kealoha’s grandmother Florence Puana because they were catching on to the fact that the Kealohas had used the proceeds from a reverse mortgage on Florence Puana’s home to bankroll a lavish lifestyle.

(Noted: one of those five, former HPD Major Gordon Shiraishi, was acquitted on all charges.)

So that’s a little more understandable, I guess? They tried to frame the uncle (who they didn’t get along with anyway) to keep the money faucet flowing.

The government said Katherine Kealoha used the money to pay for a Mercedes-Benz, a Maserati, a trip to Disneyland and other expenses including utility bills and a $23,976 breakfast at the Sheraton Waikiki to celebrate Louis Kealoha’s selection as chief.

I know real estate in Hawaii isn’t cheap, but how much did they get out of this reverse mortgage?

Prosecutors said Katherine Kea­loha burned through $135,000 of Florence Puana’s money in six months.

By the way…

The Kealohas face a second trial on Oct. 21 on charges of bank fraud, aggravated identity theft and obstruction of justice in connection with the alleged theft of a $167,000 inheritance of two children for whom Katherine Kealoha served as financial guardian.

And the insanity doesn’t end there.

Kealoha also faces charges related to allegations that she and her brother, Rudolph Puana, trafficked in opioids and that Kealoha used her position as a deputy prosecutor to hide it.

More (I apologize for the length, but this does give a fairly detailed account):

During the trial, prosecutors portrayed Katherine Kealoha as the ringleader of the conspiracy. She invented an alias, Alison Lee Wong, to forge documents, and tried to have her grandmother declared incompetent to silence her, prosecutors told the jury.
Jurors watched a deposition from Puana’s mother, Florence Puana, who was unable to testify in court because of her failing health.
Gerard Puana testified that Katherine Kealoha came to them with an idea about taking out a reverse mortgage on her grandmother’s home to help buy a condo her uncle wanted. Kealoha said she would consolidate her debts — which prosecutors described as massive — and promised her uncle and grandmother that she would pay off the loan.
Wheat noted that Kealoha tampered with potential witnesses, including sending letters trying to convince them Alison Lee Wong is a real person.
“Well, it’s pretty clear who Alison Lee Wong is,” Seabright said. “It’s Katherine Kealoha.”
Kealoha had an innocent man incarcerated and tried to silence her grandmother “after engaging in an outright theft of their money,” Seabright said.
“To be clear, it was her own grandmother she did this to,” he said.
She also got her firefighter boyfriend to lie about their affair to a grand jury and convinced the man whose childhood trust she controlled that his mother would go to jail if he didn’t lie and say Kealoha gave him his money, Seabright said.

And a little sting at the end:

Kealoha will “adapt” at the Honolulu Federal Detention Center, he said, adding that like he did, she will be able to trade her legal expertise for “food and candy.”

Posted in Cops, Law | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: June 29, 2019.

June 29th, 2019

Billy Drago, character actor. He did a fair amount of TV, played Frank Nitti in Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables”, and a deputy in “Pale Rider”.

Apparently, he was also in a Mike and the Mechanics video? And a Michael Jackson video?

Posted in Movies, TV | Comments Closed

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