This one goes out to FotB Dave: Don Collier. He did a lot of work on Westerns: “The High Chaparral”, “Bonanza”, “Death Valley Days”, “Branded”, and so on. He also did some movie work, including “Seven Ways from Sundown” (with Audie Murphy) and “Tombstone” (credited as “High Roller”).
Obit watch: September 14, 2021.
September 14th, 2021Your loser update: week 1, 2021.
September 14th, 2021We’re back, baby!
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Atlanta
Minnesota
Detroit
Chicago
Green Bay
Dallas
Washington
New York Football Giants
Baltimore
Cleveland
New England
Buffalo
New York Jets
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Tennessee
Firings watch.
September 13th, 2021Well, how about that?
We have our first college football firing, two games into the season.
Clay Helton out at the University of Southern California.
The precipitating incident seems to have been losing to Stanford on Saturday. Helton was 46-24 overall. But his record since 2018 was 19-15, and apparently the usual suspects (boosters) felt like they were consistently underperforming.
Interesting note: Ivan Jasper is going to coach quarterbacks for Navy. Why is this interesting? Jasper was fired as offensive coordinator on Saturday, but Navy’s head coach (Ken Niumatalolo) persuaded the athletic director (Chet Gladchuk) to re-instate him.
Also fired: assistant Billy Ray Stutzmann, who is being let go after his request for a religious exemption to getting the COVID vaccine was rejected.
Obit watch: September 12, 2021.
September 12th, 2021Gilbert Seltzer has died at 106.
He was one of the last members of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. His death leaves only nine surviving members.
The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops was also known as the “Ghost Army”.
“We would move into the woods in the middle of the night, going through France, Belgium and Germany, and turn on the sound” — from blaring loudspeakers — “so it sounded like tanks were moving on the roads,” Mr. Seltzer told StoryCorps in 2019. “The natives would say to each other, ‘Did you see the tanks moving through town last night?’”
“They thought they were seeing them,” he added. “Imagination is unbelievable.”
…
Mr. Seltzer, an architect, was a platoon leader and later a lieutenant and adjutant of the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion, whose ranks included men who would go on to work in advertising, art, architecture and illustration, among them the future fashion designer Bill Blass, the photographer Art Kane and the painter Ellsworth Kelly.
The battalion handled the Ghost Army’s visual fakery; the 3132nd Signal Service Company was in charge of sound deception; the Signal Company, Special, devised realistic-sounding radio messages to throw off the Germans. The 406th Combat Engineer Company provided security.
In March 1945, in one of their most elaborate feats of trickery — during the critical Rhine River campaign, designed to finally crush Germany — the 23rd set up 10 miles south of the spot where two American Ninth Army divisions were to cross the river. To simulate a buildup of those divisions at their decoy location, the Ghost Army used inflated tanks, cannons, planes and trucks; sent out misleading radio messages about the American troops’ movements; and used loudspeakers to simulate the sound of soldiers building pontoon boats.
The Germans fell for the ruse, firing on the 23rd’s divisions, while Ninth Army troops crossed the Rhine with nominal resistance.
Nino Castelnuovo, Italian actor who was perhaps most famous for a French film: he played opposite Catherine Deneuve in “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”.
Notes on film.
September 12th, 2021Peter O’Toole may have been one of the unluckiest men in movies.
This came up last night, and I’m not sure why. For some reason, Lawrence and I got into a discussion of O’Toole. (Last night’s movie was “United 93”, which, while fitting, does not have Mr. O’Toole in it.)
I would have sworn he’d won an Oscar for “My Favorite Year”, but Lawrence correctly pointed out he didn’t. His only Oscar was a honorary one in 2002 (and, according to Wikipedia, his family had a king-size job persuading him to accept it, as he felt like he wasn’t done acting yet).
But why unlucky? He was nominated eight times, which is a record for nominations without a win. But worse yet, a lot of his nominations were for fantastic roles…that just happened to go up against someone else who had a career defining role that year.
- 1962: He was nominated for “Lawrence of Arabia”. Fantastic performance, Oscar worthy, should have won, right? Except he was up against Gregory Peck for “To Kill a Mockingbird”. This is one of those times where I honestly think it should have been called a tie.
- 1964: Nominated for “Becket”. Haven’t seen that (but would like to, as it is in my wheelhouse). But he was up against Rex Harrison in “My Fair Lady”. The other nominees were Richard Burton, also for “Becket”, Anthony Quinn for “Zorba the Greek”, and Peter Sellers for “Doctor Strangelove”. I see “Strangelove” as being another one of those defining roles that in another year, O’Toole would have lost honorably to. I figure Burton and O’Toole split the “Becket” vote, and folks were probably suckers for an old-style movie musical. (Short shameful confession: while it has been a while since I’ve seen it, I like “My Fair Lady”.)
- 1968: “The Lion in Winter”. Lost to Cliff Robertson in “Charly”.
- 1969: “Goodbye Mr. Chips”. Lost to John Freakin’ Wayne in “True Grit”. Lawrence thinks that’s a career award: I’d have to see “True Grit” again.
- 1972: “The Ruling Class”. Haven’t seen that in ages, but I have fond memories of it. (Last time I saw it, I think UT still had a film program.) But comedy gets no respect from the Academy. Plus…that was the year of Marlon Brando and “The Godfather”. As you may remember, Brando sent Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse the award for him, so this was a complete waste of a good Oscar.
- 1980: “The Stunt Man”. Lost to Robert De Niro in “Raging Bull”. John Hurt was also nominated for “The Elephant Man”.
- 1982: “My Favorite Year”. Lost to Ben Kingsley for “Gandhi”, which I have not seen in many years but have fond (personal) memories of.
- 2006: “Venus“, a movie I’d never heard of until I started looking at his nominations. Frankly, this sounds like a well intentioned makeup nomination, but he lost to Forest Whitaker for “The Last King of Scotland”.
See what I mean, Vern?
Side note for Dave: the TV series in which Cloris Leachman played a Pilgrim was “Thanks“. It lasted for six episodes in 1999.
Twenty Years Ago Today.
September 10th, 2021(This is a guest post from FotB RoadRich, who is speaking in his capacity as a private citizen, and not as a representative of any Federal, state, or local governmental body, or as a representative of any corporation or non-profit organization. –DB)
Good afternoon,
Twenty years ago today (well, this evening) I went to a baseball game.
I was with friends who were also members of an athletic performance team I’m a member of. It so happens many of these friends were from families who had emigrated from Vietnam to a better place. I had been in their care since a few days prior, when after returning home from an outing with them, I discovered one of my previous cat family’s last members was near the end of his life. I called up one of my friends who rushed over and helped us both get to a vet where my little friend was confirmed to be gone, having passed away in my arms enroute. It became a very long night. A local friend offered a spot on his ranch for a burial and heading back into town I was told I was staying over at my friends’ shared apartment rather than head to an empty apartment.
The next day another of our friends visited and thought it would be good to get out of the apartment and do something, so after a quick dinner we went out to the Dell Diamond for a ball game. We were running late, so we were in line outside buying tickets when the National Anthem began to play.
Absolutely everything stopped. Tickets stopped being sold. Those in line paused and put their hands over their hearts, or removed their ball caps. I could actually see through the gates to the other side of the ball field and it looked full. But it was absolutely and completely silent. And I was moved.
The date was September TENTH, 2001. In twelve hours my small concerns would be submarined but in this moment I already felt how united we were.
Obit watch: September 10, 2021.
September 10th, 2021He was apparently most famous for “Police Academy 2” and “Police Academy 3”, but he had a pretty lengthy career before those. He was prolific on TV, appearing on “Movin’ On” and a lot of ’70s cop shows…
…including “Mannix”. (“Deathrun”, season 2, episode 13. This is one of the ones with an old Army buddy of Mannix: however, Mr. Metrano was not the Army buddy.)
TMQ Watch watch.
September 9th, 2021Since many asking: no Tuesday Morning Quarterback this season either. But I haven’t forgotten how to do it! Am keeping notes (“saving string,” to writers). If my new book out in a week https://t.co/uABXN0D3L7 is a hit that will put me in a TMQ mood for ’22. pic.twitter.com/rgBwow56yP
— Gregg Easterbrook (@EasterbrookG) September 4, 2021
But that’s not going to stop TMQ:
Hell’s Sports Bar about to reopen! No curbside service, you enter all Hell’s-branded properties.
Sunday in Hell’s Sports Bar, Texas and Florida see Houston v. Jax (2020 combined record 5-27) not Steelers v. Bills (2020 combined 27-9). https://t.co/1ffz3pVh6l
— Gregg Easterbrook (@EasterbrookG) September 8, 2021
Yes. Because two teams that had bad records last year, and turnover in the off season, will automatically be playing a bad game to start off the new season.
In other news, the loser update returns Tuesday.
Random gun crankery, some filler.
September 9th, 2021Two things that I have absolutely no use for but find oddly appealing. Both of these are kind of old, but I just discovered them in the past couple of days:
1. Lone Wolf shows them as “low stock”, but they do apparently still have 9×18 Makarov barrels for the Glock 42.
I actually learned about this by way of Lucky Gunner’s ammo tests, which I am familiar with, but was reviewing to find data about a specific caliber. I don’t know what advantage this would give me over .380 (ballistically, I think very little), and if I wanted something in 9×18, why wouldn’t I just go out and get a surplus gun? But the idea is just weird enough to turn my crank a little bit. And it is threaded for a suppressor…
2. Speaking of guns in .380 Auto…the Cimarron 1862 Pocket Navy. This is a newly manufactured gun, designed to emulate the look and feel of a 1862 Colt Pocket Navy, but set up as a cartridge-fired gun (instead of a black powder one), and chambered in .380 Auto.
Again, I have no use for this, and why would I carry one over my Glock 42? But it is another one of those things that’s so freaking weird, it turns the crank again. If I saw one turn up used at a good price, it would be tempting.
In other news, I am back from my vacation, as of Tuesday. The original plan was to attend the NRA Annual Meeting in Houston…but that was not to be. So instead, Mike the Musicologist and I spent a few days bumming around looking at gun shops, some in the area around Abilene.
I’ll probably write more about our adventures later, but since this is “random gun crankery”, I’ll mention Caroline Colt Company, which is a nice shop with a lot of quality guns, and a surprisingly good (for the times we are in) selection of ammo.
Thanks to great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl for introducing me to the work of the Snub Gun Study Group. As a confirmed snubby guy, I like this idea and wish to subscribe to their newsletter.
My snubbies. Let me show them to you.
Top: S&W 19-3 in .357 Magnum with Tyler T-grip.
Bottom: S&W Model 36 (no dash?) fitted with an Apex Tactical spring kit
(And yes, I consider the 2 1/2″ Model 19 to be a snub gun. As I recall, so did Ed Lovette in his book, The Snubby Revolver. No Amazon link because this was an old Paladin Press volume and prices are through the roof.)
In a rare combination of Smith and Wesson crankery and movie crankery, you can buy Indiana Jones’s S&W. On GunBroker. The “buy it now” price, though, is $5,000,000.00. Which is also the minimum bid. Just for comparison, the gun that killed Billy the Kid went for $6,030,312 not too long ago. (Hattip: The Firearm Blog.)
Lawrence sent over a note earlier this morning: David Chipman’s nomination to head BATFE is being withdrawn. I’d like to believe this is a good thing: maybe it is, but I’m worried the Biden administration is going to nominate someone who is even worse.
Obit watch: September 9, 2021.
September 9th, 2021Michael Constantine, noted actor.
He gets a lot of press for “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” but he did a lot of other work before (and after) that. No “Mannix”, but “Kojack”, “Homicide: Life on the Street”, “Law and Order: Original Recipe”, “Hunter”, multiple appearances on “Quincy, M.E.”, “Electra Woman and Dyna Girl”, late period “Perry Mason”, and the list goes on. He was even in “The Hustler”, which we watched just a few weeks ago.
Obit watch: September 8, 2021.
September 8th, 2021I don’t do NetFlix. I’ve never watched an episode of “Tiger King”, and I’m not sure if any of my readers have.
But just in case: Erik Cowie.
We’re through the looking glass here, people!
September 7th, 2021The Murdaugh story just gets stranger.
Alex Murdaugh, the prominent South Carolina lawyer whose wife and son were shot to death months ago in an unsolved murder mystery that has captivated the state and confounded the police, was pushed out of his powerful law firm over claims that he had misused funds the day before he called 911 from a rural road to say that he had been shot in the head, the firm disclosed on Monday.
Leaders of the Hampton, S.C., firm said they had discovered that Mr. Murdaugh had misappropriated money from the law office and that he had resigned on Friday. The next day, Mr. Murdaugh told the police he had been changing a tire at the side of a road in Hampton County — where members of his family have established a powerful legal dynasty over three generations — when someone in a truck pulled up and shot him in the head.
…
Mr. Murdaugh, 53, was a partner at the law firm P.M.P.E.D. — known by the initials of its partners — which was founded by Mr. Murdaugh’s great-grandfather more than a century ago and is well-known in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. In a statement to The New York Times, the firm said that it had hired a forensic accounting firm to investigate the suspected misappropriation of funds and that it had also notified the police and the South Carolina Bar.
The law firm said it had told Mr. Murdaugh of the accusations on Friday, and that he and the firm agreed that he should resign. Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyer said his client had expressed his “regret and sorrow.”
The law office did not say how much money was missing, but a member of the firm, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose company information, said the amount was in the millions.
Obit watch: September 7, 2021.
September 7th, 2021Damn.
— David Simon (@AoDespair) September 6, 2021
Michael K. Williams, “Omar” on “The Wire”, “Leonard” in “Hap and Leonard”, “Chalky White” on “Boardwalk Empire”, and lots of other stuff. THR.
Keith McCants. He was picked fourth overall by Tampa Bay in the 1990 draft, but turned into a bust. Tampa Bay let him go after three years, he bounced around a bit (playing with Houston and Arizona) before leaving football, and fell into addiction. He was 53, and apparently died of an overdose.
Jean-Paul Belmondo, legendary French New Wave star. (“Breathless”, among other credits.)
Tony Selby, British actor. (“Doctor Who”, “Eastenders”).
Quick miscellany.
September 6th, 2021I’m on vacation, but I’ve got a little bit of time, so a couple of quick notes:
Remember the Murdaugh murders I wrote about a few months ago?
On Saturday, someone shot Alex Murdaugh. Mr. Murdaugh is the father of Paul and husband of Maggie. Reports are that he was shot in the head, but the wound is “superficial” and he’s expected to recover.
Obit watch: Willard Scott.
…
Though he was meant to represent the new, late-model television weatherman, Mr. Scott brought to the job a brand of shtick that harked back to earlier times. He seemed simultaneously to embody the jovial, backslapping Rotarian of the mid-20th century, the midway barker of the 19th and, in the opinion of at least some critics, the court jester of the Middle Ages.
There was the time, for instance, that he delivered the forecast dressed as Boy George. There was the time he did so dressed as Carmen Miranda, the “Brazilian bombshell” of an earlier era, dancing before the weather map in high heels, ruffled pink gown, copious jewelry and vast fruited hat. There was the time, reporting from an outdoor event, that he kissed a pig on camera.
The pig did not take kindly to being kissed and squealed mightily.
…
From 1952 to 1962, Mr. Scott also played the title character on “Bozo the Clown,” the WRC-TV version of a syndicated children’s show. In the early ’60s, on the strength of his Bozo, McDonald’s asked him to develop a clown character to be used in its advertising.
As Ronald McDonald, Mr. Scott did several local TV commercials for the franchise but was passed over — in consequence of his corpulence, he later said — as its national representative.
David Janssen!
September 2nd, 2021As someone who enjoys mystery fiction and well-written true crime, I find CrimeReads to be about 50% interesting…and about 50% woke bushwa.
On the interesting side: “Remembering Harry O, The Seventies’ Second Best, Mostly Forgotten Private Eye Series” by J. Kingston Pierce (editor of “The Rap Sheet“).
I’m pretty much in the same boat: “Harry O” was right at the edge of my consciousness, but I don’t remember ever seeing an episode. (As the author notes, the series has been released on DVD, but Amazon shows them as “temporarily out of stock”, and it isn’t on Prime.)
I was thinking about this yesterday, and I kind of put David Janssen and Darren McGavin into the same mental bucket: they both seem to me to be two guys who has some success as actors, but were still the kind of people you could have a shot and a beer and a conversation with.
In case you were wondering about that “second best”, I kind of think my readers can draw their own conclusion about which series was the best. But if you’re still wondering, at the tone leave your name and message, I’ll get back to you.
Obit watch: September 2, 2021.
September 2nd, 2021My sincere thanks to Alan Simpson for sending over a tribute from the Libertarian Futurist Society to L. Neil Smith.
…
Although not as widely recognized by mainstream critics for his social conscience and passion for justice and liberty during his lifetime as this principled and idealistic author deserved, Smith regularly incorporated such themes into both his fiction and nonfiction.
For instance, a dramatic exposure of the evils of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust was at the moral center of The Mitzvah, Smith’s novel (cowritten with Aaron Zelman) about a Catholic priest, influenced by socialist ideas of the 1960s, who discovers that the German immigrant parents who raised him actually adopted him and that his true parents were a Jewish couple murdered in the Holocaust.
Smith, a longtime libertarian activist, also wrote two non-fiction books, Lever Action and Down with Power, that expressed his libertarian views, and founded, and regularly contributed essays to, The Libertarian Enterprise, an anarcho-capitalist journal.
Carolyn Shoemaker, comet hunter.
…
In spite of feeling nervous around scientific instruments as simple as a calculator, she offered to help her husband, the revered planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker, with a project gathering data on comets and asteroids.
Dr. Shoemaker believed that collisions with Earth by comets had been responsible for transporting to the planet water and other elements necessary for life, meaning that humans “may truly be made of comet ‘stuff,’” Ms. Shoemaker wrote in her essay. Dr. Shoemaker also worried that a comet hitting Earth could threaten human civilization. Yet relatively little scientific attention had been paid to the frequency and effects of cometary collision with planets.
As the dark phase of the lunar cycle began, making it easier to see faint objects in outer space, the Shoemakers would travel to an observatory on Palomar Mountain near San Diego. To locate previously unknown comets and asteroids, they aimed to photograph as much of the night sky as possible. The chirping of birds signaled bedtime.In the afternoons, Dr. Shoemaker would take the film they had used the previous night and develop it in a darkroom, then turn over the negatives to Ms. Shoemaker. Using a stereoscope, she would compare exposures of the same block of sky at different times. If anything moved against the relatively fixed background of stars, it would appear to float in the viewing device’s eyepiece.
Ms. Shoemaker was charged with discerning what was the grain of the film (and perhaps dust on it) and what was an actual image of light emitted by an object hurtling through space. “With time,” she wrote, “I saw fainter and fainter objects.”
It took a few years before she found her first new comet, in 1983. By 1994, in addition to hundreds of asteroids, she had discovered 32 comets, a number considered by the United States Geological Survey and others to represent the world record at the time.
Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker are the “Shoemaker” in “Shoemaker-Levy 9”.
One comet, known as Shoemaker-Levy 9 (named in part for their associate David Levy), had stood out from the rest. Rather than making a lonely journey through the cosmic vacuum, Shoemaker-Levy 9 was on a collision course with Jupiter. By detecting the comet shortly before impact, Ms. Shoemaker gave scientists an opportunity to examine whether or not comets slamming into planets represented major astronomical events — and to test the hypotheses of her husband’s work.
The result had all the drama the Shoemakers might have imagined: whirling fire balls, a plume of hot gas as tall as 360 Mount Everests and a series of huge wounds that appeared in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Amateur astronomers could witness much of it with store-bought telescopes.
Anticipation of Shoemaker-Levy 9 and the spectacular show it produced made the front page of The New York Times and the cover of Time magazine, which called the Shoemakers “a husband-and-wife scientific duo who spend their evenings scanning the skies for heavenly intruders.” The couple and Mr. Levy were featured in a Person of the Week segment of the nightly ABC News broadcast and met with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.
…
Today, professional astronomers use remotely controlled telescopes and digital detection software. They tend not to pull all-nighters in remote mountain regions, guiding telescopes across the night sky and developing film in their own darkrooms, as the Shoemakers did. Yet scientists still depend on methods that Ms. Shoemaker perfected.
“She and her colleagues set the stage for how to identify what we would call minor bodies in our solar system, such as comets and asteroids,” Dr. Wiseman said. “We still use the technique of looking for the relatively fast transverse motions of comets and asteroids in our own solar system as compared to the slower or more fixed position of stars.”
Obit watch: August 31, 2021.
August 31st, 2021I am seeing reports (from Lawrence and in other places) that the great libertarian SF writer L. Neil Smith has died.
However, I have been unable to find a source for this that I am willing to give credibility, links, or page views to. I’ll either update or post a new obit if this changes.
Obit watch: August 29, 2021.
August 29th, 2021Stipulated: he was a cranky old liberal whose politics drove me up a tree.
But: Lou Grant.
He made a point of largely avoiding comedy — out of fear, he said in a 2002 appearance at Vanderbilt University, and because “in those days you got discovered by doing the drama shows as a guest star.” But he agreed to audition for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” because, as he said in an Archive of American Television interview, Lou Grant “was the best character I’d ever been asked to do” in either television or film.
Lou was a hard-drinking, straight-shooting, short-tempered journalist who had tender emotions but did not plan to show them; a strong aura of professional and personal integrity; a fear that he had outlived his era; and “a great common core of honor,” as Mr. Asner told Robert S. Alley and Irby B. Brown, the authors of “Love Is All Around: The Making of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show.’”
416 credits in IMDB as an actor. That’s impressive. And he did do more than a few cop shows, including both the good and bad “Hawaii 5-0”, but never a “Mannix”.
(Here’s an IMDB list of people with over 300 acting credits. Mr. Asner is listed at #92, but the list hasn’t been updated and his count is off. Also, many of the people ahead of him are either porn actors or voice actors: Mel Blanc comes in at #9 with 1,220 credits. Eric Roberts and James Hong are the first two non-porn, not primarily a voice actor, people I recognize: Roberts with 638 credits and Hong with 444 to date.)
(What about “Up”? No comment. I’ve never seen it.)
There are times when I just want to quote the entire NYT lead: not because I’m lazy (though I am) but because they encapsulate the obit so perfectly, anything I could say would be superfluous.
Seriously, just go read this one.
For the historical record, obits from the paper of record for:
Obit watch: August 26, 2021.
August 26th, 2021David Roberts, noted climber and climbing writer.
Michael Nader, actor. He was “Dex Dexter” in “Dynasty”, and “Dimitri Marick” on “All My Children”, among other credits.
Once again, pushing the boundaries of an obit, but: if you would prefer to read about Dorothy Parker’s tombstone in the NYT instead of the NYPost, well, here you go.
Quote of the day.
August 26th, 2021(Technically, this popped up last night.)
It’s more like trying to pick up someone who doesn’t speak your language out of a crowd. At a f–king death metal concert at Madison Square Garden.
And it’s at triple capacity.
And only one door is open.
And the place is on fire.
I’m not a religious person, but the word that comes to mind is “biblical.” It’s like Hurricane Katrina meets Dien Bien Phu.
Obit watch: August 25, 2021.
August 25th, 2021Charlie Watts. THR. THR 2. BBC.
I am slightly tempted to make “never call me your drummer again” a “leadership secret of a non-fictional character” – indeed, someone on Hacker News cited this as an example of managing a high-performing team – but I can’t condone punching a cow-orker. Even if they do suffer from “lead singer’s disease”.
Buckie Leach, coach of the US women’s foil team. Lee Kiefer, one of his team members, became the first US woman to win an individual gold at the most recent games.
Mr. Leach was killed in a motorcycle accident.
Lloyd Dobyns Jr., noted NBC news correspondent. He’s another one of those NBC news guys I remember from when I was young.
I intended to note this a few days ago, but it got past me: Igor Oleksandrovych Vovkovinskiy passed away at 38. Mr. Vovkovinskiy was the tallest man in the United States: 7 feet, 8 inches.
Obit watch: August 24, 2021.
August 24th, 2021Bill Clotworthy. You almost certainly never heard of him, but you’ve seen his work.
Or, perhaps more accurately, you haven’t seen his work.
Mr. Clotworthy was a long time “standards and practices executive” – in other words, a network censor – for NBC. His nickname was “Doctor No”.
…
In a 2002 interview, Clotworthy described one SNL sketch that never made it to air:
It revolved around “a bunch of guys in a fraternity house trying to light farts,” he recalled. “You didn’t see anything, but you heard the voiceover and then there was this big explosion, and Joe Piscopo was dressed as Smokey the Bear, and he came out and said that should be a lesson to everyone — don’t fart with fire.”
He said he was OK with it but was overruled by his boss.
…
Those sound really cool. Amazon doesn’t list them, but there is a Kindle edition of Saturday Night Live: Equal Opportunity Offender: The Uncensored Censor.
Stretching the definition of an obit here, but: there was an unveiling ceremony for Dorothy Parker’s tombstone on Monday.
The story of Dorothy Parker’s ashes is almost as weird as the story of Evita’s body. After her death, her ashes sat in a crematory for six years, then in a filing cabinet in the former office of her (retired) lawyer. In 1988, her ashes were turned over to the NAACP (“In her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King Jr., and upon King’s death, to the NAACP.“)
The NACCP set up a memorial outside their headquarters in Baltimore. But when they moved in 2020, the organization returned the ashes to her family, who reburied them in Woodlawn Cemetery.
The New York Distilling Company in Williamsburg issued a commemorative gin to pay for the headstone.
Along with the gin, mourners left red roses near Parker’s grave, which lies next to those of her parents and grandparents.
The family plot is in a section of the 400-acre cemetery that includes the graves of writers such as Herman Melville and E.L. Doctorow — as well as a man dubbed “The Father of Mixology,’’ 19th century New York City bartender Jerry Thomas.
Brian Travers, founding member of UB40. Brain tumor got him at 62.
Marilyn Eastman, “Helen Cooper” in “Night of the Living Dead”.
Obit watch: August 22, 2021.
August 22nd, 2021…
…
…
In 2015, music legend Bob Dylan singled out Hall for some harsh criticism in a rambling speech at a MusiCares event. He called Hall’s song, “I Love,” “a little overcooked,” and said that the arrival of Kristofferson in Nashville “blew ol’ Tom T. Hall’s world apart.”
The criticism apparently confused Hall, as he considered Kristofferson a friend and a peer, and when asked about Dylan’s comments in an 2016 article for American Songwriter magazine, he responded, “What the hell was all that about?”
The most successful rock ’n’ roll act to emerge from Nashville in the 1950s, Mr. Everly and his brother, Phil, who died in 2014, once rivaled Elvis Presley and Pat Boone for airplay, placing an average of one single in the pop Top 10 every four months from 1957 to 1961.
On the strength of ardent two-minute teenage dramas like “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Cathy’s Clown,” the duo all but single-handedly redefined what, stylistically and thematically, qualified as commercially viable music for the Nashville of their day. In the process they influenced generations of hitmakers, from British Invasion bands like the Beatles and the Hollies to the folk-rock duo Simon and Garfunkel and the Southern California country-rock band the Eagles.
In 1975 Linda Ronstadt had a Top 10 pop single with a declamatory version of the Everlys’ 1960 hit “When Will I Be Loved.” Alternative-country forebears like Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris were likewise among the scores of popular musicians inspired by the duo’s enthralling mix of country and rhythm and blues.
Paul Simon, in an email interview with The Times the morning after Phil Everly’s death, wrote: “Phil and Don were the most beautiful sounding duo I ever heard. Both voices pristine and soulful. The Everlys were there at the crossroads of country and R&B. They witnessed and were part of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.”
Tony Mendez, David Letterman’s “Cue Card Boy” and star of “The Tony Mendez Show”.
Obit watch: August 20, 2021.
August 20th, 2021Mr. Chiba, who was trained in karate and other martial arts, began turning up on Japanese television in his early 20s. He was soon making movies as well, amassing more than 50 TV and film credits in Japan before the end of the 1960s. In the ’70s, with martial arts movies enjoying broad popularity thanks to the American-born Chinese star Bruce Lee, Mr. Chiba became widely known in Japan and beyond, especially because of “The Street Fighter” (1974) and its sequels.
“The Street Fighter,” in which his character battled gangsters, was so violent that when it was released in the United States it was said to have been the first movie given an X rating for violence alone.
“If nothing else,” A.H. Weiler wrote in a brief review in The New York Times in 1975, when the movie played in New York, “this Japanese-made, English-dubbed import illustrates that its inane violence deserves the X rating with which it has been labeled.” In 1996, when a DVD of the film was released, The Los Angeles Times said it was being “presented complete and uncut in all its eye-gouging, testicle-ripping, skull-pounding glory.”
You know, I’ve never seen “The Street Fighter”, and now I want to. (There’s a Shout! Factory blu-ray which is kind of pricy, but contains all three “Street Fighter” movies.)
209 credits in IMDB. The man worked.
Random gun crankery, some filler.
August 19th, 2021Apologies for the slowdown in posting. I’ve been working on my paper for the 2022 MLA convention on “Sexual Politics in ‘Hobgoblins‘”.
(Lawrence pointed out an interesting fact: “Road Rash” in “Hobgoblins” is the same actor who played “Maynard” in “Pulp Fiction”.)
Anyway, a couple of interesting gun politics stories by way of the NYT:
San Francisco’s district attorney on Wednesday sued three online retailers for selling “ghost guns,” untraceable firearms that can be made from do-it-yourself kits, part of an intensifying nationwide effort to stem the flood of deadly homemade weapons into American cities.
In a civil complaint filed in California Superior Court, District Attorney Chesa Boudin accused the companies — G.S. Performance, BlackHawk Manufacturing Group and MDX Corporation — of marketing a range of products in the state that furnish buyers with parts and accessories that can be quickly assembled into a functional firearm.
Note the phrasing: “…parts and accessories that can be quickly assembled into a functional firearm”, not firearms themselves. I am not familiar with California law, so I don’t know what the status of 80% parts kits is there, nor do I know if any regulations against same would pass constitutional muster.
But it feels like this is one of those things that doesn’t matter, much like Remington and Sandy Hook: they might be able to beat the case legally, but the criminal DA of San Francisco can make it expensive enough to cripple or even bankrupt the vendors.
Great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl put up a long – and, I think, fascinating – review on his blog of a vintage (1981) firearms/self defense guide from South Africa. I don’t recommend you follow the advice (and Karl does an excellent job of pointing out where it deviates from evolved practice today) but it is an interesting slice of history from a place only a few of us are familiar with.
Noted: the Smith and Wesson M&P 12. I’m kind of happy to see S&W back in the shotgun market, but I’m not wild about this particular gun.