Obit watch: July 27, 2021.

July 27th, 2021

Michael Enzi, fomer Senator from Wyoming. He’s the second prominent person I’ve seen recently who has died as a result of a bicycle accident (the other one was Greg Knapp, an assistant coach for the Jets).

I guess the moral is: be careful out there.

Dale “Snort” Snodgrass was killed in a plane crash over the weekend. The Drive put up a very nice obit for him.

You may not have heard his name, and you wouldn’t recognize him from this photo. But if you follow military aviation at all, you will recognize this photo.

The huge barreling Tomcat screams by in a right-hand knife-edge pass so close to the ship people think the picture was photoshopped. In reality, it was a well-practiced maneuver with specific airspeed, altitude, and angle of bank performance metrics briefed before the flight and debriefed after.

…

The list of Snort’s career accomplishments is long. First nugget pilot selected for training in the F-14 Tomcat along with the most hours in the F-14 Tomcat for a pilot. A TOPGUN graduate and US Navy Fighter Pilot of the Year in 1985, plus a tour as Commanding Officer of VF-33 during Operation Desert Storm leading combat missions into Iraq. He rounded out his active duty career as Commander Fighter Wing Atlantic where he spearheaded adding precision strike capability for all Tomcats. In retirement, he would go on to fly some of the world’s most legendary aircraft on the air show circuit and was a founding member and pilot for commercial adversary services provider Draken International. But Snort stands above everyone else in one area: King of the Airshow circuit in the F-14 Tomcat.

I have not had a chance to watch this yet, but Ward Carroll did a live stream tribute to Mr. Snodgrass on Sunday night. Here it is for bookmark purposes (about 40 minutes):

Posted in Obits, Planes, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 26, 2021.

July 26th, 2021

Supplemental Steven Weinberg obits: NYT. Statesman.

Jackie Mason, comedian.

Mr. Mason regarded the world around him as a nonstop assault on common sense and an affront to his sense of dignity. Gesturing frantically, his forefinger jabbing the air, he would invite the audience to share his sense of disbelief and inhabit his very thin skin, if only for an hour.
“I used to be so self-conscious,” he once said, “that when I attended a football game, every time the players went into a huddle, I thought they were talking about me.” Recalling his early struggles as a comic, he said, “I had to sell furniture to make a living — my own.”
The idea of music in elevators sent him into a tirade: “I live on the first floor; how much music can I hear by the time I get there? The guy on the 28th floor, let him pay for it.”

…

After dozens of appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Mr. Mason encountered disaster on Oct. 18, 1964. A speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson pre-empted the program, which resumed as Mr. Mason was halfway through his act. Onstage but out of camera range, Sullivan indicated with two fingers, then one, how many minutes Mr. Mason had left, distracting the audience. Mr. Mason, annoyed, responded by holding up his own fingers to the audience, saying, “Here’s a finger for you, and a finger for you, and a finger for you.”
Sullivan, convinced that one of those fingers was an obscene gesture, canceled Mr. Mason’s six-show contract and refused to pay him for the performance. Mr. Mason sued, and won.
The two later reconciled, but the damage was done. Club owners and booking agents now regarded him, he said, as “crude and unpredictable.”
“People started to think I was some kind of sick maniac,” Mr. Mason told Look. “It took 20 years to overcome what happened in that one minute.”

…

A play he starred in and wrote (with Mike Mortman), “A Teaspoon Every Four Hours,” went through a record-breaking 97 preview performances on Broadway before opening on June 14, 1969, to terrible reviews. It closed after one night, taking with it his $100,000 investment.

For the record (and per Wikipedia), “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” went through 182 preview performances.

He also invested in “The Stoolie” (1972), a film in which he played a con man and improbable Romeo. It also failed, taking even more of his money. Roles in sitcoms and films eluded him, although he did make the most of small parts in Mel Brooks’s “History of the World: Part I” (1981) — he was “Jew No. 1” in the Spanish Inquisition sequence — and “The Jerk” (1979), in which he played the gas-station owner who employs Steve Martin.

…

Appearances on the cartoon series “The Simpsons,” as the voice of Rabbi Hyman Krustofski, the father of Krusty the Clown, confirmed his newfound status, and earned him a second Emmy. Not even the 1988 bomb “Caddyshack II,” in which he was a last-minute replacement for Rodney Dangerfield, or the ill-fated “Chicken Soup,” a 1989 sitcom co-starring Lynn Redgrave that died quickly, could slow his improbable transformation from borscht belt relic into hot property.

Laura Foreman. She was a prominent and well-regarded reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1970s: so much so that she got hired by the NYT.

Her focus was Philadelphia’s 1975 mayoral race, in which the brash and cocky incumbent, Frank L. Rizzo, the city’s former police commissioner, was seeking a second term.
One of Mr. Rizzo’s close allies was Mr. Cianfrani, a longtime ward boss who became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and one of Pennsylvania’s most influential lawmakers. A streetwise power broker, he was a natural source and occasional subject for the new political writer.
Rumors began circulating that the two were involved romantically, but Ms. Foreman denied them, and the editors discounted them.

After she got hired by the NYT, it came out that the rumors were true: “…the politician had given her more than $20,000 worth of gifts, including jewelry, furniture and a fur coat, and helped her buy a 1964 Morgan sports car.”

The Times told her she had to resign, even though the conduct in question had occurred at another paper. The Times, in fact, said initially that her work had comported with the highest ethical standards. But according to an account that Ms. Foreman wrote in The Washington Monthly in 1978, A.M. Rosenthal, The Times’s executive editor, told her that because the paper was writing tough stories at the time about conflicts of interest involving Bert Lance, a close Carter adviser, it couldn’t very well harbor a conflict of its own.
To others, Mr. Rosenthal uttered an unforgettable comment that has been rendered several different ways but in essence said that he didn’t care if his reporters were having sex with elephants — as long as they weren’t covering the circus.
In Philadelphia, Mr. Roberts, the Inquirer editor, appointed the paper’s top investigative team of Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele to dig into the affair. They produced a 17,000-word article, published on Oct. 16, 1977, that exposed internal rivalries at the paper and found that editors had looked the other way to protect a favored reporter, Ms. Foreman. It was among the first instances of a newspaper turning its investigative artillery on itself.

She married Mr. Cianfrani, but never worked in journalism again. Ms. Foreman actually passed away over a year ago, but her death was only recently reported.

A burning in Hell watch, by way of Lawrence: Rodney Alcala, the “Dating Game” killer.

A longhaired photographer who lured women by offering to take their pictures, Mr. Alcala was convicted of killing a 12-year-old girl and four women in Orange County, Calif., and two women in New York, all between 1971 and 1979, the authorities said.
Investigators had also suspected him of, or had linked him to, other murders in Los Angeles, Seattle, Arizona, New Hampshire and Marin County, Calif., the department said.

…

In 1978, six years after he was convicted of molesting [removed – DB], Mr. Alcala appeared in a brown bell-bottom suit and a shirt with a butterfly collar as “Bachelor No. 1” on an episode of “The Dating Game.”
The host described him as “a successful photographer,” according to a YouTube video. “Between takes, you might find him sky-diving or motorcycling.”
Mr. Alcala won the contest, charming the bachelorette with sexual innuendo. The woman later decided not to go on a date with him because she found him disturbing, according to several news reports.

Posted in 1970s, California Über Alles, Geek, Law, Media, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 24, 2021.

July 24th, 2021

I am seeing reports that Steven Weinberg, one of the great physicists, has died.

The University of Texas has a tribute up, but I have not found a mainstream news source reporting this yet.

In 1967, Weinberg published a seminal paper laying out how two of the universe’s four fundamental forces — electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force — relate as part of a unified electroweak force. “A Model of Leptons,” at barely three pages, predicted properties of elementary particles that at that time had never before been observed (the W, Z and Higgs boson) and theorized that “neutral weak currents” dictated how elementary particles interact with one another. Later experiments, including the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, would bear out each of his predictions.

…

By showing the unifying links behind weak forces and electromagnetism, which were previously believed to be completely different, Weinberg delivered the first pillar of the Standard Model, the half-century-old theory that explains particles and three of the four fundamental forces in the universe (the fourth being gravity). As critical as the model is in helping physical scientists understand the order driving everything from the first minutes after the Big Bang to the world around us, Weinberg continued to pursue, alongside other scientists, dreams of a “final theory” that would concisely and effectively explain current unknowns about the forces and particles in the universe, including gravity.

…

“If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art,” he once told PBS. “Although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we’re starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves.”

Posted in Geek, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 23, 2021.

July 23rd, 2021

Lawrence sent over an obit for Joe McKinney. He was a San Antonio based horror writer who won two Bram Stoker awards.

McKinney, who also worked as a San Antonio Police Department sergeant, frequently set his work in the Alamo City and incorporated elements of police procedural into his novels and short stories. He died in his sleep on Tuesday, according to multiple online posts by friends, and is survived by a wife and two daughters.

…

As an author, McKinney was known for brisk, action-oriented prose. His first novel, Dead City, came out in 2006, amid a wave of zombie pop culture, and it’s been cited in academic papers as a canonical work in modern zombie fiction. The book, which follows a San Antonio patrol cop as he tries to survive an undead apocalypse, spun into a four-novel series for Pinnacle Books.

He was 52.

The Cleveland Indians.

Posted in Books, Cops, Law, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh…

July 23rd, 2021

…here I am at Camp Granada Quinebarge.

The rustic overnight camp abruptly shut down earlier this month after just six days. Camp directors informed parents, who had shelled out $3,400 for two weeks, that they needed to pick up their children the next morning, following a “summer of challenges” capped off by delays from the camp’s food supplier that made continuing untenable.
The decision to close the 85-year-old camp in Moultonborough, N.H., in the middle of the summer left campers bereft, counselors stewing, and some parents furious. Soon, stories began to circulate of problems that went much deeper than late deliveries: counselors hired just days before camp and lacking basic training; a counselor punched in the face by a child and a camper later hit in the head by the same child; dirty dishes provided at multiple meals; at least four campers vomiting and getting quarantined, while some parents said they weren’t informed; and staff quitting and being fired in high numbers.

…

“We have been in tears, bored, and devastated the whole day. [The camp director] is lying to you all,” the camper wrote. “You have to trust us. You have to. We are not joking and we are not having fun. So many things are wrong with this place.” The boy’s father, who found the note folded in his son’s pocket days after camp closed and provided it to the Globe, requested anonymity to protect his son’s privacy.

In the kitchen, the commercial dishwasher was broken, which meant unclean dishes were provided to kids during meals, according to Caliban Chesterfield, a counselor known as “Dodger” who worked in food prep. Chesterfield also said in the week leading up to camp, a staffer’s child was served a mostly raw meatball during a meal; the cook was subsequently dismissed. (The Globe confirmed this account with another staffer.) Carlson disputed that account, saying the dishwasher had an issue for one meal and that the dishes were always properly washed.

I had to post this for two reasons. One is that I can’t pass up a good Fyre Festival reference. And the other? I also can’t pass up a good classical reference.

Posted in Clippings | Comments Closed

There is such a thing as taking gun crankery too far.

July 21st, 2021

When you are stealing stuff, you’ve gone too far. Especially if you are stealing stuff from Valley Forge.

In a bizarre, early-morning burglary in October 1971, a thief used a crowbar to break into an “unbreakable” case at Valley Forge National Historical Park and left with a rifle that dates back to the American Revolution.

The rifle was made by Johann Christian Oerter. This is the rifle.

Around the same time, other antique weapons were stolen from nearby museums — an 1830s Kentucky rifle stolen from the Historical Society of York County, a Colt Model 1861 percussion revolver taken from the American Swedish History Museum in FDR Park, a C. S. Pettengill double-action Army revolver removed from the Hershey Museum.

The rifle turned up again in July of 2018.

According to the plea agreement, [Thomas] Gavin sold two antique rifles, a trunk filled with more than 20 antique pistols, and a Native American silver conch belt at his home in Pottstown in July 2018 to antiques dealer Kelly Kinzle for $27,150.

Mr. Gavin pled guilty yesterday. I would have thought the statute of limitations would have run out on this, but the NYT reports he pled to one count of “disposing of an object of cultural heritage stolen from a museum”, which I guess is how they got around that. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. (Insert obligatory note on maximum sentencing in the federal system, especially for a 78 year old man with no prior record as far as I can tell.)

A lawyer for Mr. Kinzle, the antiques dealer, to The New York Times in 2019 that his client discovered that he had bought a stolen weapon after he read about the theft of the Oerter rifle in a 1980 book by George Shumway, an expert on antique long rifles who died in 2011.

I can’t tell for sure, but I think this is a later edition of the Shumway book. (And this is the most current edition, with an added co-author.)

“I actually thought it was a reproduction,” Kinzle told the Inquirer in 2019. “My first inclination was that it had to be fake, because the real gun isn’t going to show up in a barn in today’s world. Things like that are already in collections.”

…

The rifle is one of just two dated and signed by Oerter known to still exist. The other was given to future King George IV in the early 1800s by a British cavalry officer who served in the war. It’s housed in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

Posted in Guns, Law | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 21, 2021.

July 21st, 2021

Rick Laird, noted musician.

The guitarist John McLaughlin called Mr. Laird in 1971 with an invitation to join a group he was forming with the goal of uniting the jazz-rock aesthetic — which Mr. McLaughlin had helped establish as a member of Miles Davis and Tony Williams’s earliest electric bands — with Indian classical music and European experimentalism.
The new ensemble, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which also featured the drummer Billy Cobham, the keyboardist Jan Hammer and the violinist Jerry Goodman, became one of the most popular instrumental bands of its time. It released a pair of studio albums now regarded as classics for Columbia Records, “The Inner Mounting Flame” (1971) and “Birds of Fire” (1973), and one live album, “Between Nothingness & Eternity” (1973).

After leaving Mahavishnu, he went on to tour with other artists and did one solo album. But he decided in 1982 that he needed a backup career path. So he became a professional photographer. (The NYT says that he did continue to write and perform music, but none of it has been “officially released”.)

My feelings about baseball are well known, but I did want to highlight the passing of Marjorie Adams. She spent a lot of time researching and lobbying for her great-grandfather’s (Daniel Adams) place as a founding father of baseball.

Making the case for her great-grandfather, who was known as Doc (he came by his nickname legitimately, having received a medical degree from Harvard in 1838), became Ms. Adams’s consuming passion. She advocated for him on a website, at conferences, at meetings of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and at vintage baseball festivals, where fans play and celebrate the sport, as if it were the 19th century. She nicknamed herself Cranky, for “cranks,” a period term for fans.
“Baseball is the national pastime,” she said in an interview in 2014 with SABR’s Smoky Joe Wood chapter. “It’s important that the historical record is correct.”
That record was a lie for a long time, according to John Thorn, baseball’s official historian. Abner Doubleday was for many years falsely cited as baseball’s inventor. And Alexander Cartwright, who played a role in the sport’s evolution, was credited on his plaque at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., with some of the innovations that, it turned out, were actually conceived by Adams.

…

Doc Adams began playing for the pioneering New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club in 1845. While with the team, he created the shortstop position — as a relay man from the outfield, not a fielder of ground balls and pop flies. He made his most critical contributions to the game in 1857 at a rule-making convention of which he was chairman.
There he codified some of the fundamentals of the modern game, setting the distance between bases at 90 feet, the length of a game at nine innings and the number of men per side at nine.

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Photography, Sports | Comments Closed

Quick followup.

July 21st, 2021

The Drive has an article on that spectacular jumping car I posted the other day.

Their coverage adds quite a bit, including a diagram of what appears to have happened and a link to (low quality) security cam video from another angle.

And, yes, the comments are full of Dukes of Hazard references…

Posted in Bagatelle, Cars, Safety | Comments Closed

More things I did not know…

July 21st, 2021

In an emergency, a potato chip bag and duct tape can be used as a chest seal. I don’t recommend this unless you have advanced EMT training, and I’m not sure which flavor of chips works best.

$10,000 face value in pennies weighs approximately three tons.

I think that entire article is interesting: it goes into more detail than you ever wanted to know about US pennies (and to a lesser extent, Canadian ones), as well as the economics of same. The only issue is that the events the author describes took place between 2008 and 2009, so it is a little dated.

Pennybullion.com is still in business, and will sell you $100 (face value) worth of copper pennies for $169.95 (plus $10.95 shipping and handling). They are not currently purchasing pennies, just in case you were thinking about getting into the copper penny business.

And you can still buy a Ryedale Sorter, but they go for about $500 now instead of $250.

Posted in Coins, Safety | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 20, 2021.

July 20th, 2021

Dr. Paul Auerbach, one of the pioneering figures in “wilderness medicine”.

A medical student at Duke University at the time, he went to work in 1975 with the Indian Health Service on a Native American reservation in Montana, and the experience was revelatory.
“We saw all kinds of cases that I would have never seen at Duke or frankly anywhere else except on the reservation,” Dr. Auerbach said in a recent interview given to Stanford University, where he worked for many years. “Snakebites. Drowning. Lightning strike.”
“And I just thoroughly enjoyed it,” he continued. “Taking care of people with very limited resources.”
Back at Duke he tried to learn more about outdoor medicine, but he struggled to find resource material.
“I kept going back to literature to read, but there was no literature,” he said. “If I wanted to read about snake bites, I was all over the place. If I wanted to read about heat illness, I was all over the place. So I thought, ‘Huh, maybe I’ll do a book on wilderness medicine.’”

…

The resulting book, “Management of Wilderness and Environmental Emergencies,” which he edited with a colleague, Edward Geehr, was published in 1983 and is widely considered the definitive textbook in the field, with sections like “Protection From Blood-Feeding Arthropods” and “Aerospace Medicine: The Vertical Frontier.” Updated by Dr. Auerbach over 30 years, it is in its seventh edition and now titled “Auerbach’s Wilderness Medicine.”
“Paul literally conceived of this subspecialty of medicine,” said Dr. Andra Blomkalns, chair of emergency medicine at Stanford. “At the time, there wasn’t a recognition that things happen when you’re out doing things. He developed this notion of, ‘Things happen to people all the time.’ Which is now a big part of our identity in emergency medicine.”

John P. McMeel, co-founder of Universal Press Syndicate (later Andrews McMeel Universal).

Indefatigably sunny, Mr. McMeel had the optimism — and the stamina — of a true salesman. Jim Davis, the creator of the misanthropic cat Garfield, first met Mr. McMeel at an American Booksellers Association convention in 1981. Mr. McMeel approached him for an autograph, brandishing a Garfield book with a contract tucked inside. But Mr. Davis had a long-term contract with United Media, which had been syndicating his strip.
“It became a running gag,” Mr. Davis said. “Every time we met he’d hand me a newspaper or something with a contract inside.” After 15 years, Mr. Davis was finally free to sign with Universal.
“The thing with John,” he said, “is it didn’t feel like business. I once did an interview and the reporter asked me why Gary Larson had retired and I was still going. I said: ‘Well, Gary works so hard and he puts so much pressure on himself. Me, if I feel that kind of pressure, I lower my standards.’ It was that kind of air that John encouraged.”

For the record: NYT obit for Kurt Westergaard.

Posted in Geek, Obits | Comments Closed

Bagatelle (#39?)

July 19th, 2021

Quick throw away post of two videos by way of the NYPost.

1) I don’t think that is going to buff out…

2) I’m only posting this one so I can say, “Go forth and kill! Zardoz has spoken!”

Posted in Bagatelle | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 19, 2021.

July 19th, 2021

William F. Nolan, SF writer. His most famous work (co-authored with George Clayton Johnson) was Logan’s Run, basis for the movie of the same name.

[Ray] Bradbury introduced Nolan to the man who would become his best friend for 10 years, until his untimely death: Charles Beaumont. Nolan, Johnson, Beaumont, Richard Matheson, Chad Oliver, Charles E. Fritch, Kris Neville, John Tomerlin, Mari Wolf and several others eventually comprised “The Group,” which met to discuss stories. Nolan would shortly thereafter flourish as a writer and later a screenwriter, primarily for director Dan Curtis.

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Kurt Westergaard, cartoonist.

He gained global notoriety in 2005 for his controversial depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in Jyllands-Posten, which published 12 editorial cartoons of the principal figure of Islam under the headline, “The Face of Mohammed.”
Westergaard was behind the most controversial of the cartoons published by the paper, showing the prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, according to the BBC. The cartoon intended to make a point about self-censorship and criticism of Islam.

He was 86, and died in his sleep.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Very brief historical note (some parental guidance suggested).

July 17th, 2021

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency skywalk collapse.

This is something that shook me up at the time, and I’m not sure I can do it justice today. KMBC 9 has put up a documentary, “The Skywalk Tapes”, which I feel comfortable embedding here. (I thought about using the “Seconds From Disaster” episode, but all the YouTube copies I could find were low quality.)

Texas A&M Civil Engineering Ethics Site case study. Photos of the failed components (nothing graphic).

“Follow command and control. Follow communications. Never give up hope. And never give up respect for your patients,” Waeckerle said.

Posted in History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 17, 2021.

July 17th, 2021

Quick roundup, in some haste:

Biz Markie. 57. Damn.

Dennis Murphy, founder of the American Basketball Association. Also the World Hockey Association, the International Women’s Professional Softball League, and Roller Hockey International.

“He was fun and creative,” Mr. O’Brien said, “and he was always hustling somebody.”

Posted in Music, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

History repeats itself.

July 16th, 2021

The first time as farce. Also the second time:

NYPost.

As a side note, 10 cents in 1974 dollars works out to 55 cents in 2021 dollars, so I think those fans were getting rooked.

Posted in History, Sports | Comments Closed

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