Obit watch: March 4, 2020.

March 4th, 2020

I’m dropping into the obscure here, but I have reasons.

Rafael Cancel Miranda. Mr. Miranda was one of the four men who shot up the US Capital on March 1, 1954.

Mr. Cancel Miranda, a hero to many who favor independence for Puerto Rico but a terrorist to many others, was 23 when he and three companions attacked the Capitol, spraying gunfire from the gallery into the House chamber and injuring five congressmen as 243 House members were debating a bill involving migrant workers from Mexico.
The four — the others were Lolita Lebrón, Irvin Flores Rodríguez and Andres Figueroa Cordero — were not satisfied with the agreement that had made Puerto Rico a United States commonwealth in 1952, believing that it was a sham and that the island essentially remained an occupied colony.
Ms. Lebrón waved a Puerto Rican flag briefly and shouted about independence as the attack unfolded and House members sought cover. The four were overpowered and arrested.
Although the scene was chaotic, Mr. Cancel Miranda, at least, was convinced that most of those injured “got hurt by my gun,” as he put it when he was freed in 1979.
“No congressman in particular was the target,” he said then. “It was just an effort to shoot up the place. If we aimed to kill, believe me, that would have happened.”

All four men served “lengthy prison sentences”, at least by NYT standards. Wikipedia says that Mr. Miranda was sentenced to 85 years.

In 1977 President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentence of Mr. Figueroa Cordero, who had cancer and died in 1979. President Carter freed the other three in 1979, though they had never sought clemency, considering themselves political prisoners.

Mr. Miranda was the last surviving member of the quartet.

I’ve been going back and forth about this one, and came down on the side of inclusion. Not because this person was famous, but because this is another example of the kind of thing the paper of record does well: the obit for the person who was important to the community in some way, without necessarily being famous.

In this case, Matvey “Falafel” Natanzon, backgammon player.

His illness prematurely ended a roller-coaster career during which he went from sleeping under a bench in Washington Square Park, where he lived for nearly six months after college, to mastering backgammon, a board game that combines rolls of the dice with strategic checker moves.

…

In his short pants, sweatshirt and knitted wool hat, Mr. Natanzon could look like an amiable loser to his easy marks, as he baited them with his nonstop babble and swaggering hubris.
He would graduate to winning (and, on rarer occasions, losing) tens of thousands of dollars in as little as an hour; achieve celebrity status in a game that had migrated from black-tie casino tables to cheesy hotel ballrooms, where baseball caps worn backward were de rigeur; and be named the top player in an unofficial ranking by his peers, known as the Giants of Backgammon.
“Falafel is, without a doubt, backgammon’s No. 1 commentator and is probably its best-known celebrity,” Joe Russell, the chairman of the backgammon federation’s board, said when he awarded Mr. Natanzon the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. “He has been in the top 10 of the Giants list seven straight times, and has been voted No. 1 twice and No. 2 once.”

He was 51. A brain tumor got him.

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 3, 2020.

March 3rd, 2020

James Lipton. THR. I wish I had more to say about him, but my anti-cable TV policy means that I never saw an episode of “Inside the Actor’s Studio”, and I’m way too young to remember “The Lone Ranger” on the radio.

One thing I don’t think I was consciously aware of until I read his obit: he also wrote An Exaltation of Larks.

Claudette Nevins. She was one of those knock-around actresses: she was in the original production of “Plaza Suite” and toured nationally with “The Great White Hope”. She also did a lot of TV, especially in the 70s: “Barnaby Jones”, “M*A*S*H” (she was the woman Charles Emerson Winchester “married” while drunk in Tokyo), “Mrs. Colombo”, “Switch”, “Lou Grant”, “The Rockford Files”, “Electra Woman and Dyna Girl”, “The F.B.I.”…and the list goes on. (She even did an episode of “Police Squad“. (“In Color”!)) Never did a “Mannix”, though, at least per IMDB.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 2, 2020.

March 2nd, 2020

I was going to make this a special true crime edition, but I got overtaken by events.

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE.

It was a time when successful, lavishly paid corporate executives were more admired than resented. Mr. Welch received a record severance payment of $417 million when he retired in 2001. Fortune magazine named him the “Manager of the Century,” and in 2000 The Financial Times named G.E. “the World’s Most Respected Company” for the third straight year.
Mr. Welch’s stardom extended beyond the business world. In a 2000 auction for the rights to his autobiography, Time Warner’s book unit won with a bid of $7.1 million, a record at the time. “Jack: Straight from the Gut,” written with John A. Byrne, was published the next year and eventually sold 10 million copies worldwide.

…

He attacked bureaucracy and made sweeping payroll cuts, creating a more entrepreneurial, if more Darwinian, corporate culture. He led the globalization of G.E.’s business, both expanding sales and manufacturing overseas. And he made G.E. far more dependent on finance, as banking and investment grew as a share of the American economy.
Mr. Welch distilled his management concepts into one-sentence nuggets. “Control your destiny, or someone else will.” “Be candid with everyone.” “Bureaucrats must be ridiculed and removed.” “If we wait for the perfect answer, the world will pass us by.”
His goal at G.E., Mr. Welch wrote in his autobiography, was to create “a company filled with self-confident entrepreneurs who would face reality every day.”

…

Mr. Welch was also attacked when he was leading G.E., especially for slashing the G.E. work force, which earned him the nickname “Neutron Jack.” But most of the second thoughts about him and his management legacy have arisen in recent years. The superstar chief executive, laser-focused on enriching shareholders, is often criticized today as a symbol of corporate greed and economic inequity.
The widely diversified corporation that Mr. Welch built is also out of favor, an idea underlined by G.E.’s precipitous decline in the last few years.
The New York Times business columnist James B. Stewart wrote in 2017, “Hardly anyone considers Mr. Welch a management role model anymore, and the conglomerate model he championed at G.E. — that with strict discipline, you could successfully manage any business as long as your market share was first or second — has been thoroughly discredited, at least in the United States.”

Joe Coulombe, founder of Trader Joe’s.

Linda Wolfe, writer. She started out writing short fiction, and was clipping true crime stories to use in novel plots…

A turning point of sorts came in 1975, when twin doctors, both gynecologists, were found dead in their trash-filled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It turned out that Ms. Wolfe had been the patient of one of them, years before — only briefly, but that was enough to propel her to investigate the case and turn to a life of writing about crime.
“This will sound callous,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1994, but she felt lucky that she had had “the ‘good fortune’ of knowing somebody involved in the kind of story I had been clipping.”
Both doctors had been barbiturate addicts and had died not of an overdose but of the drug’s typically severe withdrawal syndrome. Ms. Wolfe, by then working at New York magazine (she worked there for 25 years as a contributing editor, writer and restaurant reviewer), wrote a journalistic account of the case, “The Strange Death of the Twin Gynecologists.” Her article inspired the David Cronenberg movie “Dead Ringers” (1988), which starred Jeremy Irons.

She became a prominent true crime writer.

She would go on to write several books and magazine articles that delved behind some of the nation’s most sensational headlines. Her articles included “The Professor and the Prostitute” (1983), about a Tufts University professor who bludgeoned to death the prostitute he loved, and “From a Nice Family” (1981), about a teenager in Dallas who killed his mother and his father, who was the president of Arco Oil and Gas.
One of her best-known books was “Wasted: The Preppie Murder” (1989), so called because the perpetrator, Robert E. Chambers Jr., had bounced around various elite schools and lived on the Upper East Side. He pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the 1986 strangulation death of Jennifer Levin in Central Park after they had had sex behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was released in 2003 after serving 15 years in prison and subsequently went back to prison on drug charges.

I read parts of The Professor and the Prostitute quite a while back: it shows up pretty frequently at Half-Price Books. I might have to grab a copy next time I’m there.

Finally, Dr. Charles Friedgood. I’d never heard of him either, but this is one of those interesting true crime stories (for multiple reasons). Dr. Friedgood was convicted of killing his wife in 1975.

While he admitted that he had injected his wife, Sophie Friedgood, 48, with a painkiller, Dr. Friedgood insisted that he had not intended to kill her. She had suffered a stroke in 1959, when she was 33, and had become an invalid.
Dr. Friedgood was convicted of second-degree murder after prosecutors proved to a jury that he had deliberately given his wife an overdose at the family’s 18-room home in Great Neck, N.Y., where they had reared their six children.
Her cause of death was recorded as a stroke, but the police grew suspicious because Dr. Friedgood had signed the death certificate himself and rushed the body out of state for immediate burial in accordance with Jewish religious custom.
Five weeks later, he was arrested at Kennedy International Airport with more than $450,000 of his wife’s cash, negotiable bonds and jewelry. Prosecutors said he had intended to fly to Europe to join his paramour, a Danish nurse who had sometimes cared for Mrs. Friedgood and with whom he had fathered two children. He had begun his affair with the nurse in the late 1960s.

He was sentenced to 25 years to life. He was released on compassionate grounds in late 2007, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He’d served 31 years and was 88 when he was released.

He lived another 11 years after being released. According to the NYT, he died in May of 2018 at the age of 99, but his death had not been reported until now.

Posted in Books, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 28, 2020.

February 28th, 2020

Freeman J. Dyson, noted physicist.

As a young graduate student at Cornell in 1949, Dr. Dyson wrote a landmark paper — worthy, some colleagues thought, of a Nobel Prize — that deepened the understanding of how light interacts with matter to produce the palpable world. The theory the paper advanced, called quantum electrodynamics, or QED, ranks among the great achievements of modern science.
But it was as a writer and technological visionary that he gained public renown. He imagined exploring the solar system with spaceships propelled by nuclear explosions and establishing distant colonies nourished by genetically engineered plants.

…

Dr. Dyson called himself a scientific heretic and warned against the temptation of confusing mathematical abstractions with ultimate truth. Although his own early work on QED helped bring photons and electrons into a consistent framework, Dr. Dyson doubted that superstrings, or anything else, would lead to a Theory of Everything, unifying all of physics with a succinct formulation inscribable on a T-shirt. In a speech in 2000 when he accepted the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, Dr. Dyson quoted Francis Bacon: “God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.”
Relishing the role of iconoclast, he confounded the scientific establishment by dismissing the consensus about the perils of man-made climate change as “tribal group-thinking.” He doubted the veracity of the climate models, and he exasperated experts with sanguine predictions they found rooted less in science than in wishfulness: Excess carbon in the air is good for plants, and global warming might forestall another ice age.
In a profile of Dr. Dyson in 2009 in The New York Times Magazine, his colleague Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate, observed, “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”

He was also skeptical of the “nuclear winter” theory.

He considered himself an environmentalist. “I am a tree-hugger, in love with frogs and forests,” he wrote in 2015 in The Boston Globe. “More urgent and more real problems, such as the overfishing of the oceans and the destruction of wildlife habitat on land, are neglected, while the environmental activists waste their time and energy ranting about climate change.” That was, to say the least, a minority position.
He was religious but in an unorthodox way, believing good works to be more important than theology. “Science is exciting because it is full of unsolved mysteries, and religion is exciting for the same reason,” he said in his Templeton Prize acceptance speech. “The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.”

…

Any advanced civilization, he observed in a paper published in 1960, would ultimately expand to the point where it needed all the energy its solar system could provide. The ultimate solution would be to build a shell around the sun — a Dyson sphere — to capture its output. Earthlings, he speculated in a thought experiment, might conceivably do this by dismantling Jupiter and reassembling the pieces.

He was also one of the folks behind Project Orion.

In the late 1970s Dr. Dyson turned full force to writing. Anyone with an interest in science and an appreciation for good prose is likely to have some Dysons on the shelf: “Disturbing the Universe,” “Weapons and Hope,” “Infinite in All Directions,” “The Sun, the Genome and the Internet.”
He also entered literature in a different way. He appeared in John McPhee’s book “The Curve of Binding Energy” (1974), a portrait of Ted Taylor, the nuclear scientist who led the Orion effort, and in Kenneth Brower’s “The Starship and the Canoe” (1978). In a memorable scene, Mr. Brower wrote of Dr. Dyson’s reunion with his son, George, who had turned his back on high technology to live in a treehouse in British Columbia and build a seafaring canoe. George Dyson later returned to civilization and became a historian of technology and an author. Dr. Dyson’s daughter Esther Dyson is a well-known Silicon Valley consultant.

Statement from the Institute for Advanced Study. This is a great line:

In 1956, Dyson began a three-year association with General Atomic, where he worked to design a nuclear reactor that would be inherently safe, or, as colleague Edward Teller put it, “not only idiot-proof, but PhD proof.”

I’m going to have to start using “PhD proof” more often in conversation.

This is eloquently stated, and seems like a good note to end on:

“No life is more entangled with the Institute and impossible to capture—architect of modern particle physics, free-range mathematician, advocate of space travel, astrobiology and disarmament, futurist, eternal graduate student, rebel to many preconceived ideas including his own, thoughtful essayist, all the time a wise observer of the human scene,” stated Robbert Dijkgraaf, IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor. “His secret was simply saying “yes” to everything in life, till the very end. We are blessed and honored that Freeman, Imme, and their family made the Institute their home. It will be so forever.”

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Physics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 27, 2020.

February 27th, 2020

Kind, generous, and thoughtful Friend of the Blog Borepatch forwarded a nice obit from the Guardian for the late Clive Cussler, which was much appreciated.

In the early 2000s, Cussler agreed to work with co-authors at the request of his US publisher Simon and Schuster, in order to publish more frequently; in 2017 alone, he published four novels. “I don’t give a damn,” he said in a 2015 interview, in reply to criticism of the move. “I never had a highfalutin view of what I write. It’s a job. I entertain my readers. I get up in the morning and I start typing … I want it to be easy to read. I’m not writing exotic literature. I like snappy dialogue and short descriptions and lots of action.”

There’s an interesting obit in the NYT for Dr. Stanley Dudrick, who passed away at 84. I’d never heard of him, but when people say you rank with…

…Joseph Lister and Ignaz Semmelweis, who pioneered antiseptic medical procedures; William T.G. Morton, who popularized anesthesia during surgery; and Sir Alexander Fleming, who is credited with the discovery of penicillin.

What did he do? Well, when he was a medical resident, three people who had gone through “technically sucessful” surgeries died in the hospital. He wanted to know why, and devoted his time to research…

…finding the answer to be deceptively simple. But more than that, he perfected a treatment — one that has been credited with saving the lives of millions of premature infants as well as those of adults with a wide range of ailments, including cancer, severe bowel, kidney and liver diseases, and burns.

The deceptively simple cause?

The cause of the three deaths that had so motivated him, he concluded, was severe malnutrition. The patients had been unable to eat or to absorb enough nutrients to sustain life.
Malnutrition had often gone unrecognized as a direct or contributing cause of death because death certificates typically cited an underlying disease, like cancer or liver failure.

Dr. Dudrick developed “total parenteral nutrition” (TPN)…

…which bypasses the intestinal tract when a patient cannot receive food or fluids by mouth and instead injects nutrients — liquid carbohydrates, electrolytes, fats, minerals, proteins and vitamins — directly into the circulatory system through a vein.

He never patented TPN.

The intravenous delivery of concentrated nutrients proved successful over time in stimulating and restoring normal bodily functions, including immune systems of patients with malignant growths.
The technique has not only increased the chances of survival after operations; it has also spared many patients surgery — often because a diagnosis of malnutrition had not been contemplated and nutrition was not considered a remedy.

One peer who is quoted in the article believes Dr. Dudrick is responsible for saving “tens of millions of people across the world.”

Posted in Books, Geek, Obits | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#63 in a series)

February 27th, 2020

Catherine Pugh got three years of prison time, and three years of probation. She also has to pay $669,000 in restitution.

Baltimore Sun, which is being really obnoxious.

I’m still unable to find any “Healthy Holly” books on Amazon. There’s one copy of “Exercising Is Fun” available, at a price of $19,560.41: I’m pretty sure that’s someone (or some bot) gaming Amazon’s system, and that’s not a legit offer.

(While I’ve been keeping an eye out, since I knew she was being sentenced today, hat tip to Lawrence, who emailed me the story while I was busy picking up barbecue for the office.)

Posted in Books, Law, Politics | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 26, 2020.

February 26th, 2020

My brother sent out an obit watch for Clive “Raise the Titanic!” Cussler. I have not been able to find an obit to link to yet, but his passing seems to be confirmed by a post from his wife on his Facebook page. When I find actual obits, I’ll either update here or post another obit watch tomorrow.

Edited to add: Of course. Literally five minutes after I hit “Publish”, the paper of record posts their obit.

He began writing fiction at home in the late 60s, but his first two books, “Pacific Vortex” and “The Mediterranean Caper,” were repeatedly rejected. Unable even to get an agent, he staged a hoax. Using the letterhead of a fictitious writers’ agency, he wrote to the agent Peter Lampack, posing as an old colleague about to retire and overloaded with work. He enclosed copies of his manuscripts, citing their potential.
It worked. “Where can I sign Clive Cussler?” Mr. Lampack wrote back. In 1973, “The Mediterranean Caper” was published, followed by “Iceberg” (1975) and “Raise the Titanic!” (1976).
Despite an improbable plot and negative reviews, “Raise the Titanic!” sold 150,000 copies, was a Times best seller for six months and became a 1980 film starring Richard Jordan and Jason Robards Jr.

I actually kind of enjoyed the book “Raise the Titanic!”, but I was young at the time. I also paid actual money to see the movie in a theater, and that was a piece of s–t.

His books sales have been staggering — more than 100 million copies, with vast numbers sold in paperback at airports. Translated into 40 or so languages, his books reached The New York Times’s best-seller lists more than 20 times, as he amassed a fortune estimated at $80 million.

Ahem. Ahem.

While searching for his obit, though, I stumbled across the THR one for Ben Cooper. He was in a fair number of Westerns: “Johnny Guitar”, “Support Your Local Gunfighter”, “The Fastest Guitar Alive”. He also did a lot of TV guest spots: “Gunsmoke”, “Bonanza”, “The Rifleman”, “Death Valley Days”, and had regular spots on “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo” and “The Fall Guy”…

…and yes, he was on “Mannix” twice. (“The Playground”, season 3, episode 4, the same one Robert Conrad was in. That’s the next one we’re watching, Lawrence. Also “To Cage a Seagull”, season 4, episode 10.)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 25, 2020.

February 25th, 2020

Hosni Mubarak, deposed Egyptian leader. Hat tip to Lawrence on this, and I’m going to defer to him on any geopolitical angle: I just don’t know enough about Middle Eastern affairs.

John Franzese, Mafia guy.

Prosecutors portrayed him in his prime as one of the Mafia’s top “earners,” generating many millions of dollars in loot, and as one of its most fearsome killers. In 1967, prosecutors asserted that an informer had heard Mr. Franzese boast that he had been involved in 40 or 50 underworld executions.
At his last trial, in 2011, prosecutors said a turncoat had secretly recorded him graphically describing how hit men should dismember and dispose of bodies to evade arrest. “I killed a lot of guys,” he was quoted as saying in a pretrial hearing. “You’re not talking about four, five, six, ten.”

…

His first felony conviction — on federal charges of masterminding four nationwide bank robberies — came in March 1967. Nine months later, in December 1967, he was the subject of a state trial in Queens on charges of ordering the death of a suspected government informer, whose body, with 17 stab wounds and six bullet wounds and weighted with two concrete blocks, was discovered in Jamaica Bay. He was found not guilty.
After appeals lasting three years in the bank robbery case were denied, Mr. Franzese, in 1970, began serving an indeterminate term of up to 50 years. He was paroled in 1978, but, in a series of revolving-door parole violations, he spent about 20 of the next 30 years in federal penitentiaries.

He was convicted of extortion in 2011, sentenced to eight years, and was released in 2017. In the “who’d thunk it” department (hi, Borepatch!), Mr. Franzese was 103 when he died (apparently of natural causes, though his family declined to give details).

Diana Serra Cary, also known as “Baby Peggy”. I’d never heard of her, and I apologize for the long quotes, but I think this is a sad story (though maybe with a happy ending). She was a famous child star in silent films:

Her name was Peggy-Jean Montgomery, and she was a precocious 2½-year-old in 1921 when Century Studio cast her as Baby Peggy, opposite Brownie the Wonder Dog. America soon fell in love with the chubby-cheeked little girl as she fled burning buildings, held thugs at bay with a pistol and clung to the underside of a train.
A Century fire in 1926 and decaying celluloid have left only a few of her vintage films in museum archives, in the Library of Congress and on the internet, including “Playmates” (1921), “Miles of Smiles” (1923), “Helen’s Babies” (1924) and “Captain January” (1924). But silent film aficionados say she could evoke terror, joy, pity and sorrow with the best of them, and was a good mimic, too, satirizing adult stars of the day, including Rudolph Valentino and Pola Negri in “Peg o’ the Movies” (1923).
By age 5 she had made more than 150 pictures, mostly short comedies and melodramas, for Century, Universal and Principal Pictures, and was a multimillionaire. Home was a Beverly Hills mansion near Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. A $30,000 chauffeur-driven limousine took her to work every day.

…

“I had identity problems from the time I was growing up,” Ms. Cary recalled in a 1999 interview with silentsaregolden.com. “Baby Peggy was very powerful. She was very popular. Nobody knew who I was — I mean, me. So I had this terrific personality that the whole world knew, and then I had me to deal with. So I couldn’t get my head together, and I couldn’t be me as long as I was carrying her.”
In 1925, Baby Peggy’s career crumbled. A $1.5 million contract was canceled, and she was virtually blacklisted in Hollywood after her father, a cowboy stuntman and stand-in for the Western star Tom Mix, had a bitter falling out with a studio boss over her salary. She made one last picture, “April Fool,” in 1926, and then found no more work in Hollywood. She was washed up, a 7-year-old has-been.

,,,

For several years after her film career faded, Baby Peggy performed on a grueling vaudeville circuit to support her parents in the style to which they had become accustomed. They squandered much of her $2 million fortune on hotels, luxury cars and travel. The rest was lost or embezzled by a stepgrandfather who absconded, or it evaporated in the stock market crash of 1929. The home in Beverly Hills was sold, as were the cars, jewels and other luxuries.
As the Depression deepened, the family moved to a ranch in Wyoming. Dirt poor and struggling, they pawned everything of value. A friend lent the family $300, and against Peggy’s wishes they returned to Hollywood and put her back to work, now as a teenager in the talkies. From 1932 to 1938, she appeared in eight films as an anonymous extra or in small roles credited to Peggy Montgomery.

…

After graduating, she eloped in 1938 with her first boyfriend, Gordon Ayres, a movie extra. They were divorced in 1948. She was a switchboard operator and a bookstore clerk, and then managed a gift shop in Santa Barbara. She told no one of her past, and took the name Diana Serra. In 1954, she married Bob Cary, an artist, and took his surname. They had a son, Mark. Her husband died in 2001. Besides her son, she is survived by a granddaughter, Stephanie.
The Carys settled in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he painted and she became a freelance journalist, writing magazine articles. In 1970, they moved to La Jolla, part of San Diego, and she began a new career as a film historian. Her first book, “The Hollywood Posse” (1975), was a well-received account of stunt riders in film. Her second, “Hollywood’s Children” (1978), recounted the often troubling stories of child actors.
But it was the years of work on her memoir, “Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy? The Autobiography of Hollywood’s Pioneer Child Star” (1996), that proved therapeutic and redemptive. She re-examined her life in silent films, her parents’ conduct in frittering away her fortune, the studios’ harsh working conditions and the fates of child stars who, like her, were left impoverished, emotionally scarred and largely forgotten.
In “Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King: A Biography of Hollywood’s Legendary Child Star” (2003), she wrote about her old friend, who sued his mother and stepfather in 1938 for spending his more than $3 million in earnings on furs, diamonds, homes and expensive cars.

…

In recent years, Ms. Cary also appeared at silent film festivals, lectured, gave interviews and appeared in documentaries about her career, including Vera Iwerebor’s “Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room,” which was shown on Turner Classic Movies in 2012.

She was 101 years old, and is considered (at least by the paper of record) to have been the last surviving child star of that era. (“About a dozen other silent-era actors survive, but most were uncredited extras or ensemble players in series like the “Our Gang” pictures of the 1920s.”)

Posted in History, Law, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 24, 2020 (rocket science edition)

February 24th, 2020

Katherine Johnson.

“NASA was a very professional organization,” Mrs. Johnson told The Observer of Fayetteville, N.C., in 2010. “They didn’t have time to be concerned about what color I was.”
Nor, she said, did she.
“I don’t have a feeling of inferiority,” Mrs. Johnson said on at least one occasion. “Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better.”
To the end of her life, Mrs. Johnson deflected praise for her role in sending astronauts into space, keeping them on course and bringing them safely home.
“I was just doing my job,” Ms. Shetterly heard her say repeatedly in the course of researching her book.

I thought about noting this over the weekend, but I couldn’t find a way to write about it without being disrespectful to the dead. So: Mike “Mad Mike” Hughes.

Mr. Hughes “didn’t really care if the Earth was flat, and was fully ready to concede his error once he could see it with his own eyes in a final stunt that he was working towards,” the post read.
Mr. Shuster, his publicist, maintained that Mr. Hughes’s professed flat-Earth beliefs were simply intended to garner money and publicity for his stunts.
“He was eccentric and believed in some government conspiracies, for sure, but it was a P.R. stunt,” Mr. Shuster said.

Posted in Geek, History, Movies | Comments Closed

Noted for the record.

February 24th, 2020

As a now convicted felon, Harvey “I’m going to give the NRA my full attention” Weinstein will no longer be able to legally own firearms.

Apparently, though, he will be allowed to vote after he is released from prison (once he is on probation or parole). Since he hasn’t been sentenced yet, who knows when that will be: but I suspect it won’t be before the 2020 elections.

Edited to add: by way of Popehat on the Twitters, Scott Greenfield explains sentencing in New York as it relates to Harvey Weinstein:

(This is a thread. If I understand it correctly, there’s no option for him to get probation on the class B felony, and there’s a minimum term of five years.)

Posted in Guns, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 21, 2020.

February 21st, 2020

I can’t put this one any better than the paper of record did:

Sy Sperling, Founder of Hair Club for Men (and Also a Client), Dies at 78

Several people sent me obits for Lawrence Tesler:

Mr. Tesler worked at a number of Silicon Valley’s most important companies, including Apple under Steve Jobs. But it was as a young researcher for Xerox at its Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s that he did his most significant work: helping to develop today’s style of computer interaction based on a graphical desktop metaphor and a mouse.
Early in his Xerox career (he began there in 1973), Mr. Tesler and another researcher, Tim Mott, developed a program known as Gypsy, which did away with the restrictive modes that had made text editing complicated. For example, until Gypsy, most text-editing software had one mode for entering text and another for editing it.

…

The Gypsy program offered such innovations as the “cut and paste” analogy for moving blocks of text and the ability to select text by dragging the cursor through it while holding down a mouse button. It also shared with an earlier Xerox editor, Bravo, what became known as “what you see is what you get” printing (or WYSIWYG), a phrase Mr. Tesler used to describe a computer display that mirrored printed output.

…

It was Mr. Tesler who gave Mr. Jobs the celebrated demonstration of the Xerox Alto computer and the Smalltalk software system that would come to influence the design of Apple’s Lisa personal computer and then its Macintosh.

The NYT ran a nice obit for Kellye Nakahara Wallett. There’s also a very good tribute to her on Ken Levine’s blog.

Esther Scott, actress. (“Boys N the Hood”)

Ja’Net DuBois, “Willona Woods” on “Good Times” and co-writer and performer of the theme for “The Jeffersons”.

Bonnie MacLean, another one of the 1960s San Francisco psychedelic poster artists.

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Obit watch: February 19, 2020.

February 19th, 2020

Several people mentioned this one to me over the weekend, but I couldn’t find a good obit. Lawrence sent me one from the Midland Reporter-Telegram, but I thought it was incomplete.

It seems like about five minutes after I hit publish on yesterday’s obit watch, the NYT put their obit up. Timing. The secret of comedy.

So, without further delay: Clayton Williams, the man who, as Lawrence put it, “could have changed the course of Texas politics and history, if he’d just been able to keep his mouth shut”.

A successful entrepreneur who had never run for political office, Mr. Williams, a Republican, made one memorable try in 1990 in a marquee matchup against Ann Richards, the state treasurer and, like Mr. Williams, a larger-than-life figure. She had come to national prominence at the 1988 Democratic National Convention when she said that the Republican presidential nominee, George H.W. Bush, had been “born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

…

Mr. Williams spent lavishly, casting himself as an independent cowboy type who had risen from humble roots to become a powerful business tycoon. He promised to get tough on crime and “make Texas great again.” The polls pointed to an easy victory.

I recall one campaign ad in which he promised to introduce convicts to “the joys of busting rocks”.

But during the campaign, he repeatedly sabotaged himself.
His comment about rape came early in the campaign, when he was sitting around a campfire in bad weather with reporters he had invited to his ranch. He compared the bad weather to rape, saying, “If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.”
An Associated Press report quickly made the comment national news. He said he was joking and, Texas Monthly reported, was apologetic “but not contrite.”The comment didn’t sink his campaign immediately. But in the end, it added to the weight of other blunders.
He bragged about going to prostitutes as a young man, saying that doing so was the only way to get “serviced” in the 1950s. At a debate, he refused to shake hands with Ms. Richards, a gesture widely criticized as poor sportsmanship.
When a poll showed Ms. Richards, a recovering alcoholic, gaining on him, he responded by saying, “I hope she hasn’t gone back to drinking again.” He then vowed to “head her and hoof her and drag her through the mud,” as if she were cattle.
And if all this hadn’t sealed his fate, especially with Republican women, he disclosed in the final days of the campaign that he had not paid income taxes in 1986, thanks to an oil bust that had touched off a recession — even though just four years later he was pouring $8 million of his own money into the race for governor. Ms. Richards made hay with that disclosure.

Mr. Williams blew a massive lead, and lost the election. He was the last Republican to lose a governor’s race in Texas.

An entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded more than two dozen companies, Mr. Williams had a business portfolio that also included farming, ranching, banking and real estate concerns.
He even dabbled in telecommunications. In 1984, he and his second wife, Modesta (Simpson) Williams, founded the first all-digital long-distance company in Texas, ClayDesta. He starred in his own television commercials, which were filmed on his Alpine ranch.
When proposed legislation threatened the business, he galloped up to the state capitol on a horse to hold a news conference opposing the bill. (The bill died.)

For the Texas A&M graduates in my audience, he was also a loyal Aggie, who gave a lot of money to the school.

You don’t see color like that much these days.

Posted in Obits, Politics, Texas | Comments Closed

Flaming hyenas updates.

February 18th, 2020

A couple of quick things from the weekend that I’m just now getting around to:

Catherine Pugh’s sentencing hearing in the “Healthy Holly” scandal was last week. The government is asking for five years. Her lawyers are asking for a year and a day.

The statement of facts accompanying Pugh’s plea in November described how Pugh defrauded businesses and nonprofit organizations out of nearly $800,000.
Prosecutors said Thursday that Pugh’s “personal inventory” of Healthy Holly books never exceeded 8,216 copies. But through a “three-dimensional” scheme, they say, she was able to resell 132,116 copies for a total of $859,960. She gave another 34,846 copies away.
“Corporate book purchasers with an interest in obtaining or maintaining a government contract represented 93.6% of all Healthy Holly books or $805,000,” prosecutors said.

Also, this would kind of amuse me, if it wasn’t so sad:

Included in the sentencing memorandum is a scene from an April raid on Pugh’s home. FBI agents came to seize, among other items, her personal cellphone. Prosecutors say Pugh handed over a red, city-issued iPhone, but investigators said they wanted her personal phone, a Samsung. She told them she had left it with her sister in Philadelphia.
An agent then called the Samsung phone.
“Almost immediately, the agents heard a vibrating noise emanating from her bed. Pugh became emotional, went to the bed and began frantically searching through the blankets at the head of the bed. As she did so, agents [started] yelling for her to stop and show her hands,” prosecutors wrote.
Pugh had grabbed the phone from underneath her pillow, and the agents took it from her.

In other news, remember Mohammed Nuru, indicted San Francisco Director of Public Works? This broke over the weekend: the current mayor says she used to date him, “20 years ago”.

I wouldn’t consider that “bad” or “newsworthy” by itself, but this is: she also took “a gift” from him.

The mayor said her 18-year-old car broke down and Nuru took it to a private mechanic who fixed it up. Nuru also helped her get a rental car. Breed said the value of those favors was about $5,600.

But she claims this isn’t “a gift that she had to report under the city’s ethics laws”, even though accepting gifts from your underlings is questionable in any environment, and possibly illegal under ethics laws.

Also, and I say this without snark, having been in this position myself recently: Mayor Breed, if your 18 year old car is going to cost $5,000 to fix, maybe you need to be looking at another car instead.

Posted in California Über Alles, Cars, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Charity.

February 18th, 2020

I saw the GoFundMe for Clay Martin cross the Twitter feeds I follow.

I didn’t post about it here because my resources are limited: I can’t give money to everyone I think is worthy. I wish I could, but I generally try to limit my donations to people I know personally. I’ve never met Mr. Martin, and know nothing about him other than what I’ve read on Twitter.

But then I read on Twitter last night that there are apparently a group of vets who don’t like Mr. Martin’s opinions, and are metaphorically crapping all over his GoFundMe.

I’m trying to avoid strongly worded language these days (for reasons). And saying “f–k those guys” doesn’t do anything positive.

This does. I’m kicking in a few bucks, because nobody deserves to be crapped on when they are hurting (or trying to help someone who is hurting).

Posted in Endorsements | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

February 18th, 2020

Ron Jans out as head coach of FC Cincinnati. This is being presented as a “resignation”, but it is a resignation that comes after he was accused of using “racial slurs”.

“As Major League Soccer’s investigation unfolded and some themes emerged, Ron offered his resignation and we agreed that it was the best course of action for everyone involved with FC Cincinnati,” club President Jeff Berding said in a team news release.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 18, 2020.

February 18th, 2020

Charles Portis, author (True Grit, Norwood, The Dog of the South).

A lot of people I know (especially in the SF community) praise Portis. He’s on my list, but so far I’ve only read parts of True Grit. I need to go back and read the whole thing: the use of voice in this novel is fascinating.

The narrative voice of “True Grit” is that of a self-assured old woman, Mattie Ross, as she recalls an adventure she had in Arkansas’s Indian Territory when she was 14, on a quest to track down her father’s killer with Cogburn’s help.
Mr. Portis wanted her to sound determined to “get the story right,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2012. The book has virtually no contractions, and the language is insistently old-fashioned.

I think more to the point that this is a book written from the point of view of a determined older woman, recounting a formative experience of her youth, and Portis manages to capture both the teen and the adult.

Mr. Portis shrank from the attention his more celebrated novels attracted. He steadfastly refused to be interviewed, although he made himself available to talk about his life for this obituary. When drawn into public gatherings, he dodged photographers. But he didn’t like to be called a recluse or compared to the likes of J.D. Salinger. He pointed out that his name was in the Little Rock phone book.

…

Mr. Portis’s reluctance to talk to the news media may have been traceable to his days as a reporter, when intruding on people’s lives was part of the job description. Mattie, his narrator in “True Grit,” may be voicing Mr. Portis’s own feelings when she speaks of the reporters who had sought her out to tell them her story of Rooster Cogburn.
“I do not fool around with newspapers,” Mattie says. “The paper editors are great ones for reaping where they have not sown. Another game they have is to send reporters out to talk to you and get your stories free. I know the young reporters are not paid well and I would not mind helping those boys out with their ‘scoops’ if they could ever get anything right.”

(Interestingly, this is another NYT obit where the subject outlived the obit writer.)

It may be kind of a cliche, but this section is quoted in the NYT obit. I’m also a sucker for John Wayne, and this is one of my favorite Wayne moments.

(“Fill your hand, you son-of-a-bitch!” Such a useful phrase.)

Kellye Nakahara Wallett. As Kellye Nakahara, she was perhaps best known as “Lt. Kellye Yamato” on M*A*S*H, a character who was mostly a bit player (though the character was featured in one episode near the end of the run). M*A*S*H Wiki entry.

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

Obit watch: February 17, 2020.

February 17th, 2020

It was another busy weekend, and there were several obits that meet at the intersection of crime and death. I’m trying to tread very carefully here, and I think I’m going to put the more crime related ones after a jump.

A.E. Hotchner has passed away at 102. Interesting guy: he was a close friend of Ernest Hemingway (“…Mary Hemingway, Ernest’s widow, tried unsuccessfully to stop publication of what turned out to be Mr. Hotchner’s most famous book, “Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir” (1966), which included closely observed and painfully revealed details of the paranoia and distress that preceded Hemingway’s suicide.“) and of Paul Newman: the two men co-founded Newman’s Own.

Tony Fernandez.

Fernandez won four straight Gold Gloves with the Blue Jays in the 1980s and holds club records for career hits and games played.

He was a five time All Star player.

He was a .288 hitter with 94 homers and 844 RBIs in 2,158 big league games. He remains the last Yankees player to hit for the cycle in a home game, accomplishing the feat in 1995.
Fernandez finished with 2,276 hits, 1,057 runs, 414 doubles, 92 triples, 246 stolen bases.

He did at 57 of kidney failure.

For the hysterical record: Barbara Remington. (Previously.)

Father George Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory.

Recognized among astronomers for his research into the birth of stars and his studies of the lunar surface (an asteroid is named after him), Father Coyne was also well known for seeking to reconcile science and religion. He applauded Pope Francis for addressing the role that humans play in climate change, and he challenged alternative theories to evolution like creationism and intelligent design.
“One thing the Bible is not,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1994, “is a scientific textbook. Scripture is made up of myth, of poetry, of history. But it is simply not teaching science.”

…

During Father Coyne’s tenure, the Vatican publicly acknowledged that Galileo and Darwin might have been correct. Brother Consolmagno said it would be fair to say that Father Coyne had played a role in shifting the Vatican’s position.

…

“God in his infinite freedom,” he wrote, “continuously creates a world that reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity. He is not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves.”
He went further by finding fault with intelligent design.
“If they respect the results of modern science, and indeed the best of modern biblical research,” he wrote, “religious believers must move away from the notion of a dictator God or a designer God, a Newtonian God who made the universe as a watch that ticks along regularly.”
He added, “Perhaps God should be seen more as a parent or as one who speaks encouraging and sustaining words.”

He was the director from 1978 until he retired in 2006.

In the Times Magazine interview, Father Coyne was asked, “How can you describe the universe as a vast empty infinitude, largely uninhabited, and still believe in — ”
“The centrality of man in the universe?” he interjected, completing the reporter’s thought.
“There’s no doubt about it,” he went on. “To our own knowledge of ourselves, we are unique in creation because of our self-reflexivity. I can know myself knowing. I am having a conversation with you, and I can remember that conversation. To this, the Catholic Church comes along and says, ‘The reason this is true is because you have an individual soul.’”

Caroline Flack. I had never heard of her, but apparently she was the host of a British reality TV show called “Love Island”. In December, she was charged with domestic assault of her boyfriend and suspended from the show.

She was 40 years old, and apparently committed suicide.

Two previous contestants died by suicide, Sophie Gradon in 2018 and Mike Thalassitis in 2019. Their deaths stirred a debate in Britain over the ethics of reality television and the duty that broadcasters have to care for contestants.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.

After the jump, the more legal related entries…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Law, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Today’s bulletin from Bizarro World.

February 14th, 2020

(Also, possible defensive gun use, but it is too early to be sure.)

I ran across this story in the Statesman yesterday, but I’m linking to the Dayton Daily News coverage instead, as it makes my head hurt less. (Which is a shame, as the author of the Statesman story is someone RoadRich and I met in our Citizen’s Police Academy class.)

Cutting to the chase: guy in Ohio comes home and is confronted in his driveway by his ex-wife’s current husband with a gun. Guy has an Ohio CCW permit, pulls out his own gun, and shoots current husband dead.

Ex-wife then shows up in the driveway as well, and pulls a gun on her ex-husband. Whereupon he shoots her dead too.

“I shot them, they came up and had a gun pointed at my wife’s head,” the man told the dispatcher while asking for authorities to get to his 3443 Grinnell Road home as quickly as possible.
Fischer said that about five years ago the homeowner told the sheriff’s office that he believed his ex-wife, Cheryl Sanders, was trying to hire someone to kill him. That was the only threat that the sheriff’s office received.

…

A camera system was set up in the area of the shooting, said Sheriff Gene Fischer. A phone found in Sanders’ [current husband – DB] car was reportedly receiving that video.

The whole husband/wife apparently (and allegedly) ambushing the ex-husband seems bizarre enough to me. The local spin on this Ohio story is that current husband and wife lived in Bee Cave (a suburb of Austin, just down the road from Lakeway). Also, the wife was a former stunt woman:

According to her online biography, Cheryl Sanders said her career as a stunt woman in the 1980s and ’90s included being a double for Brooke Shields, Sharon Stone, Rene Russo, Kathleen Turner and other A-list actresses. She did stunt double work for Jessica Alba in 2016.

And, by the way: Dave Chappelle was not involved in this incident. Really.

Posted in Guns, Law, Media | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 14, 2020.

February 14th, 2020

Paul English, Willie Nelson’s drummer. (Hat tip: Lawrence.)

For the historical record: the NYT obit for Dyanne Thorne.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 13, 2020.

February 13th, 2020

Paula Kelly.

Ms. Kelly burst into the movies in 1969 in “Sweet Charity,” an adaptation of the stage musical about an ever-hopeful taxi dancer — a dance partner for hire — in a run-down Times Square dance hall. Ms. Kelly played the dancer Helene, one of two best friends of the title character, Charity Hope Valentine, played by Shirley MacLaine. Chita Rivera played the other.
Although lesser known than the movie’s big stars — Sammy Davis Jr. also had top billing — Ms. Kelly more than held her own, especially in the seductive number “Big Spender” and the energetic “There’s Got to Be Something Better Than This,” in which the three dance-hall girls express their determination to get respectable jobs.
Onstage, Ms. Kelly played Helene in the London production of “Sweet Charity” (with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields and a book by Neil Simon). The director, Bob Fosse, who also directed and choreographed the show on Broadway, asked Ms. Kelly to reprise the role for the movie, which was to be his feature-film directorial debut.
He called her “the best dancer I’ve ever seen.”

She went on to other movie roles, including “The Andromeda Strain” (the original), “Soylent Green”, and “The Spook Who Sat By the Door”. She also did guest spots on a lot of 70s TV that wasn’t “Mannix”: “Cannon”, “Police Woman”, “The Streets of San Francisco”. She also played a public defender on “Night Court”.

Despite her many acting roles, Ms. Kelly’s first love was dance.
“The only time I feel complete expression is when I’m dancing,” she told the black weekly The New Pittsburgh Courier in 1968. “Then I feel I have no problems, no worries, no hangups. I feel I could do anything in the world.”

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

Obit watch: February 11, 2020.

February 11th, 2020

I’m not sure I would have posted an obit for Terry Hands, former head of the Royal Shakespeare Company, if it hadn’t been for one particular element in his resume.

Mr. Hands was with the Royal Shakespeare Company for almost a quarter-century, joining it in 1966 to run Theatregoround, an outreach program. In 1978 he became joint artistic director with Trevor Nunn, and from 1986 until his departure in 1990 he was the company’s chief executive.
One highlight of his tenure there was his work with the actor Alan Howard, whom he directed in an ambitious staging of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part 1,” “Henry IV, Part 2” and “Henry V” at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1975, with Mr. Howard starting out as Prince Hal in the first play in the cycle and growing into the title character in “Henry V.”< Another noteworthy pairing came in the 1980s, when Mr. Hands directed Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” and Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” Derek Jacobi and Sinead Cusack starred in both, as Cyrano and Roxane in the first and as Benedick and Beatrice in the second. Mr. Hands moved both productions to Broadway in 1984, running them in repertory.

So what was that element? He also directed the original 1988 Broadway production of “Carrie”.

With music by Michael Gore, lyrics by Dean Pitchford and a book by Lawrence D. Cohen, the show had had a rocky start at Stratford-upon-Avon, but Mr. Hands, who directed, took it to New York anyway. Critics were unkind, to say the least. Mr. Rich, singling out a scene involving the slaughter of a pig, invoked another famous Broadway flop.
“Only the absence of antlers separates the pig murders of ‘Carrie’ from the ‘Moose Murders’ of Broadway lore,” he wrote in his review.
“Carrie” closed three days after it opened and has been something of a theatrical reference point — and not in a good way — ever since. Mr. Hands, though, who during his Royal Shakespeare tenure had pushed to expand that company beyond its comfort zone, had known that failure was a possibility and had embraced the challenge.

(“Moose Murders” explained.)

“I’m haunted by the specter of endless revivals of ‘Peter Pan’ to pay for endless revivals of ‘Peter Pan,’” he told The Associated Press in 1990 shortly before he left, referring to the J.M. Barrie play that has been a Christmas perennial.

Joseph Shabalala, founder of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The current NYT obit is an early incomplete one, with promises of a full obit later.

Mr. Shabalala began leading choral groups at the end of the 1950s. By the early 1970s his Ladysmith Black Mambazo — in Zulu, “the black ax of Ladysmith,” a town in KwaZulu-Natal Province — had become one of South Africa’s most popular groups, singing about love, Zulu folklore, rural childhood memories, moral admonitions and Christian faith.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s collaborations with Paul Simon on the 1986 album “Graceland,” on the tracks “Homeless” and “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” introduced South African choral music to an international pop audience.

Posted in Music, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Farce.

February 10th, 2020

The first games in the new XFL season took place over the weekend.

The first firing took place today.

Pepper Johnson was fired as defensive coordinator of the Los Angeles Wildcats.

Also, Anthony Johnson, linebacker and one of the team captains, declared on Twitter that he’s a free agent.

I wonder if the check didn’t clear…

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Texican standoff.

February 10th, 2020

I keep hoping for a gunpoint standoff between some Federal law enforcement agency and some local government: pot, guns, it doesn’t matter to me what causes the standoff. I just like the idea of two law enforcement agencies pointing guns at each other: “Let’s settle this Federalism question once and for all, mofo!”

Why do I bring this up? Well, there was a story on the Statesman website yesterday about a possible standoff between the FBI and the Austin Police Department. Here’s what’s going on:

I’ve written before about the 1991 yogurt shop murders and the impact they had on the Austin psyche. Almost 30 years later, this something that’s still talked about, debated (was it crooked cops?), and cited as a defining moment for the city. I think part of what makes this the case is that there’s been no solution.

But there’s a new DNA technology called Y-STR. Apparently, with this technology, it’s possible to narrow down recovered DNA to just the male only component of the sample. So APD sent DNA samples to a lab and got a Y-STR profile, which doesn’t match any of the existing suspects or their family members. So they expanded their search:

They accounted for many of the customers at the shop that evening and got DNA samples from them. There was no match. They used yearbooks from the girls’ schools to build lists of their classmates, and then covertly gathered DNA samples from many of them off discarded soda cans or cigarette butts. Again, there was no match. Worried that first responders might have contaminated the scene, they tested every man who had gone into the burned-out yogurt shop. Still, no match.

Then they submitted the profile to an online Y-STR database…

The National Center for Forensic Science at the University of Central Florida operates the U.S. Y-STR Database containing 29,000 samples for population research. Its website says it has samples from “government, commercial and academic resources throughout the United States” and that “all forensic laboratories and institutions are invited to contribute.”
Today, the website contains a disclaimer, saying that it does not function as a law enforcement database and “cannot be used to identify a particular individual whose sample is in the database. All donors are anonymous (and samples) cannot be traced back to specific individuals.”

And they got a hit. But there’s a problem: the owners of the database, and the FBI, won’t release the data on who submitted the sample. (The FBI is involved because the sample was submitted by one of their forensic analysts.)

Montford said agency officials cited a 1994 federal law that created a national forensics database that law enforcement officials use for investigations. That law, they said, required officials to protect the identity of anonymous donors whose DNA was submitted to the Florida database for population research.
“They basically say, ‘We would love to help you, but we have a federal statute that says we can’t release it,’” Montford said.

Why would you put a law like that in place? Well, the DNA in the database can’t be used for a unique identification: at best, it would narrow the field down to “thousands of men” who have the same profile. APD seems to be fine with that: after all, cutting down the possible number of matches from about half of the people who lived in Austin in 1991 to a thousand or so might be useful. But the FBI and the people who run the database seem to be afraid of the possibility that innocent people might become suspects.

At their wits’ end, De La Fuente and other prosecutors began considering a subpoena for the information. They say they are still weighing such an unprecedented step, but fear the litigation would cost untold time and money.
In a statement to the Statesman, the bureau said, “The FBI did not perform forensic testing in this case and cannot speak to this case.”
The FBI acknowledged that it had provided anonymous male profiles to the Florida university for a study into how many of those profiles exist in a specific population and were legally allowed to do so. But the bureau said, “These profiles are not suitable for matching to an individual.”

Posted in Austin, Cops, FBI, Law, Politics | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 9, 2020.

February 9th, 2020

Let’s get down to it.

Paul Farnes. He was 101, and the last surviving RAF ace from the Battle of Britain.

…for three months, through the end of October, the R.A.F. battled the Luftwaffe for supremacy in the skies over Britain. Flying a Hurricane fighter for the 501 Squadron, Mr. Farnes, a sergeant pilot, proved supremely adept at attacking German aircraft.
In August alone he shot down three Junkers Ju Stuka bombers, a Dornier 17 light bomber and a Messerschmitt 109E fighter.At the end of September, as Mr. Farnes maneuvered his malfunctioning Hurricane back to the R.A.F.’s Kenley base, he spotted a German bomber flying directly at him at about 1,500 feet.
“I thought, ‘Good God,’ so I whipped out and had to reposition myself and managed to get ’round behind him,” he said in an interview with the website History of War in 2017. “I gave him a couple of bursts, and he crashed at Gatwick just on the point between the airport and the racecourse.”

…

Aerial warfare against the Germans meant breaking away from the squadron, finding something to shoot at, firing away, then breaking away to safety. But by Mr. Farnes’s account it was also enjoyable, because he was able to combine his love of flying with the mission to protect Britain.
“The C.O. would quite often pick the next members of the squadron that had to be at ‘readiness,’ and the two or three who weren’t picked would be pretty fed up,” he told History of War. “If you weren’t picked, you’d think, ‘Why can’t I go?’ I’m sure one or two must have felt, ‘Well, thank God I’m not going!’ But a lot of us were quite happy to go.”

Robert Conrad. THR. Variety.

I was a little young for “Wild Wild West” in first run; if it was syndicated in Houston when I was a kid, I don’t remember it. It could have been on the station we were never able to pick up (the same one OG “Star Trek” was on). And “Hawaiian Eye” was before my time. But if you’re my age or a little on either side of it, this was like candy for us:

He also appeared multiple times on “Mission: Impossible” and other series, either as the lead of some less than successful ones (“High Mountain Rangers”) or doing guest shots. He did do a “Mannix”. (“The Playground”, season 3, episode 4.) And I didn’t know this, but he played G. Gordon Liddy in the TV movie version of “Will”.

Orson Bean. Variety. THR. Interesting guy: I remember him from “Being John Malkovich” and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him on some of those old game shows on Buzzr. In the 1960s, he founded a progressive school in New York City.

Believing that America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Mr. Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970. He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, “Me and the Orgone.” (Orgone is a concept, originally proposed by Reich, of a universal life force.)
When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children. For years he led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and self-described househusband, casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization.

In the 1980s, he settled down again and resumed acting. He was 91 years old when he died: he was hit by a car while walking, fell, and was run over by a second car (according to Variety).

After the jump, more obits.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 1970s, Books, History, Law, Mannix, Movies, Nixon, Obits, Planes, Theatre, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit meta watch.

February 8th, 2020

There’s been a lot of news today.

I’m going to wait until tomorrow and get one mega post up covering everyone, including Orson Bean, Robert Conrad, Kevin Conway, and the last RAF ace from the Battle of Britain.

Not that I’m ignoring anyone, just won’t have time to do justice until tomorrow afternoon.

Posted in Admin, Obits | Comments Closed

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