So the run off election for city council members is over.
Sabino “Pio” Renteria is going to retain his place in District 3.
Natasha Harper-Madison is the new District 1 council person.
Paige Ellis is the new District 8 council person.
As I’ve said previously, I will be updating the City Council contact page, but it will be after the new members take office and I can get their information: I think that will be early January.
Melvin Dummar, historical footnote, passed away last Sunday at the age of 74.
I’m not sure how many of my readers remember Mr. Dummar and his saga. To summarize: one night in 1967, Mr. Dummar picked up a drifter by the side of the road and gave him a ride. The drifter told him that his name was Howard Hughes. Mr. Dummar forgot about the incident until nine years later, when Mr. Hughes died…
…and a will turned up at the Morman Church headquarters that left 1/16th of the Hughes estate to the church…
…and 1/16th of the estate to Mr. Dummar. (This was about $156 million in 1976 dollars.)
Of course there were legal cases.
But after his fingerprints were found on the envelope, he testified that a stranger had given it to him at his gas station and that he had taken it to the church headquarters.
A jury decided that the will was forged, and while no one was ever officially charged, Mr. Dummar was found guilty in the court of public opinion.
…
Jonathan Demme made what is supposedly a pretty good movie (haven’t seen it yet) out of this story, “Melvin and Howard“.
Thing I didn’t know: there’s a revisionist movement, apparently led by a retired FBI agent, that claims Mr. Dummar’s story was true, and he was cheated out of his rightful inheritance by a vast conspiracy “replete with acts of obstruction of justice, witness intimidation and possible jury tampering.” Yeah. Gonna take some convincing to get me to buy that.
…please put a penny in the old man’s hat.
Or, you know, buy some books. (Yes, most of these links are Amazon links, and yes, I do get a kickback if you buy things through them.)
Books from Lame Excuse Books make fine presents for everyone on your list! Or, at least, every SF fan on your list. And if they are not an SF fan, books from Lame Excuse will make them one! If you sign up for the mailing list now, you’ll get the brand new Lame Excuse Books catalog absolutely free!
Speaking of SF fans on your list, I confess: I have not read these yet. But I backed the Kickstarter, am a big fan of the author himself, and have heard good things about the books, so I’d also suggest you consider Travis J. I. Corcoran’s The Powers of the Earth and Causes of Separation. The Powers of the Earth won the Prometheus Award this year: how could you go wrong with this choice? (Okay, maybe the SF fan on your list isn’t a Libertarian. Yet. Like I said, how could you go wrong?)
Also unread by me, but in my “to read” stack, and another person I like: Amy Alkon’s Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence.
Here are some books I did read, and liked, this year, that don’t pertain to my more esoteric interests. (If that’s your cup of tea, you probably already have the book on Savage rifles: as a matter of fact, you probably bought it when Ian mentioned it was on sale at Amazon.) They didn’t necessarily come out this year (one did, and one was reprinted): these are just a few things I liked, and that I think deserve more attention. I know we’re getting close to Christmas, but many of these books are available in Kindle editions and can be delivered more or less instantly, if your recipient has bought into the Kindle lifestyle.
Under an English Heaven: The Remarkable True Story of the 1969 British Invasion of Anguilla, Donald E. Westlake: I wrote about this back when the book was first re-released, and I finished it not too long after the Amazon shipment arrived. This is every bit as good as I thought it was going to be: definitely more Dortmunder than Parker, but with the added bonus of being 100% true. Wikipedia really doesn’t do justice to the whole bat guano insane story, especially the British involvement in it: even after being repeatedly whacked across the nose with a metaphorical 2×4, the British government still failed to understand that the people of Anguilla didn’t want to be governed by a ruler who threatened to strip the whole island bare and reduce them to “sucking on bones”. Enthusiastically recommended, and not just for Westlake fans.
The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, Reverend James Martin, SJ: This was a Half-Price Books discovery. I feel obligated to note here that Rev. Martin is kind of a controversial figure on the Catholic Twitters. Briefly summarizing something that’s more complex, he represents and advocates for a more liberal Church, which puts him crosswise with certain other Catholics who I also respect greatly.
With that said, I thought this was a very good book. It’s not just about being a Jesuit (though there’s a lot of Jesuit history in it), but about applying the Jesuit way of thought and general principles in your daily life, whether you are a Catholic or not. You could be a Zen Buddhist or even an agnostic: Father Martin’s idea is that applying these principles can make you a happier, more spiritually balanced person. This is a book I want to go back to, perhaps next summer when I’m on a break from other activities.
The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church, Margaret Visser: I loved Visser’s Much Depends on Dinner when I read it (mumble mumble) years ago (and I need to re-read it). I was unaware of this book, though, until TJIC retweeted someone quoting from it (everything comes back to TJIC), so I went out and found a copy on Amazon…
…and I’m delighted I did. Visser’s basic idea is to take a “typical” church (St. Agnes Outside the Walls, in Rome) and show how the design and architecture of the church feeds into the liturgy of the church, how the liturgy of the church feeds into the design and architecture of the church, and how “all the pieces matter”. (Yeah, I know, I’m mixing the sacred with the profane. So shoot me.)
When I was reading this book, there was something on almost every page that was moving or profound or stunning or funny or that I just simply wanted to make a quote of the day over here. This is the kind of book that I want to buy more copies of and give out to people: that’s how strongly I feel about it.
Walking Through Holy Week, Karen May: Disclaimers: Karen May goes to one of the churches I go to, and I got this book for free because of something I was involved in at that church. All of that aside, I thought this was a wonderful guide to the liturgy and meaning of Holy Week. If you’ve ever wondered “What does this mean?” or “Why do we do this?”, this is the book for you. It’s also a book that I plan to re-read during holy week next year.
How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, Ryan North: I backed the Kickstarter for this (it was also the last Kickstarter I backed before I deleted my account) so I got the signed package deal. But you can still get the book from Amazon, or probably from your favorite bookstore.
When I was young, we had a two-volume set around the house called something like “How Things Work” that explained the basics of how everyday objects (like car engines, generators, etc.) worked. North (also the guy behind Dinosaur Comics) seems to be trying to do a similar thing, but not just concentrating on mechanical objects. The book itself is contained in a sort of narrative: basically, it’s intended to be a guide for a stranded time traveler so that they can rebuild civilization from scratch (or near it) to the point where their time machine can be repaired. I found parts of that narrative to be slightly annoying, honestly. But that’s a minor part of the book, and it’s offset by North’s coverage of, basically, how stuff works: everything from brewing beer and distilling alcohol, to designing a Pelton turbine, to “inventing” music and logic.
One of the things I like about North’s book is his concept that there are five foundational “technologies” you need if you want to re-invent civilization: spoken language, written language, a “non-sucky” number system, the scientific method, and a calorie surplus. I haven’t seen things laid out in that way before, and it makes a lot of sense. Language lets you communicate ideas, the scientific method lets you test them, numbers let you do math to implement your ideas, and surplus calories let you sit around and have ideas, instead of trying to scratch survival out of the dirt.
There are also a off-the-wall ideas, like “instead of inventing clocks that work on ships, let’s invent radio!” that I’m not completely sure I agree with, but are interesting to consider. (In fairness, most of these, like the radio idea, are only being relayed by North.)
In a way, it reminds me of James Burke’s “Connections” (which I rewatched a few months ago), except instead of showing how invention proceeds in fits and starts, the idea is to bypass all the fits and starts and speed things right along. If you have a curious and reasonably mature child (there’s some factual material in here about human reproductive biology, so parental advisory), you could do a lot worse than to give them a copy of this book and a flash drive with all the episodes of “Connections” on it for Christmas.
If anybody else has any recommendations, please feel free to leave them in comments. Even if you’re plugging your own book: go ahead and do it, just don’t be obnoxious about it.
Helen Klaben Kahn passed away on December 2nd. She was 79.
I know, I know, but I’m a sucker for a good survival story.
Ms. Klaben (at the time) was a young woman and had been kicking around Alaska for a few months. She wanted to visit Asia, so she hopped on board a single engine aircraft piloted by Ralph Flores. (She was planning to make her was to San Francisco, and to Asia from there.) On February 4, 1963, they took off from Whitehorse heading for Fort Saint John.
Unfortunately, the weather was bad, and Mr. Flores was not an instrument rated pilot. They ended up crashing into the side of a mountain near the border between the Yukon and British Columbia. But: they survived the crash.
Ms. Klaben and Mr. Flores crashed in terrain that was waist-deep in snow, with temperatures as numbing as 48 degrees below zero. Without wilderness survival training, Mr. Flores adapted nonetheless. He wrapped Ms. Klaben’s injured foot in her sweaters, covered the openings of the cabin with tarpaulins and tried, without success, to fix their radio to send out a distress signal and build rabbit traps.
What little food Ms. Klaben and Mr. Flores had brought on board — a few cans of sardines, tuna fish, fruit salad and a box of Saltine crackers — was rationed and gone within 10 days. They drank water, some of it filtered through shreds of one of her dresses and boiled in an empty oil can. They ate bits of toothpaste that they squeezed from a half-filled tube — and virtually nothing else, they said.
They survived for 49 days before finally being rescued.
…
The appetite for adventure that she nourished as a child did not leave after the crash. Mrs. Kahn, as she became known, had no fear of flying and no nightmares and traveled widely with her family to Europe, Asia and the Caribbean.
“We’d travel with her from one European city to the next, meeting kids from other countries,” her son, Dr. Kahn, said in a telephone interview. “She was a global citizen, whether we were in fancy places or campsites.”
She also taught survival skills to the Girl Scouts, schools and other groups.
Oh, mama, can this really be the end?
To be stuck inside of TMQ with those NFL blues again…
After the jump, this week’s (possibly last?) TMQ…
Reggie McKenzie done as general manager of the Oakland Raiders.
Surprisingly, this week’s TMQ does not contain an item in which Gregg Easterbrook complains that McKenzie was a scapegoat for Jon Gruden’s failings as manager. (TMQ Watch will probably be up tonight.)
I was in San Antonio over the weekend for an event. We stumbled across this memorial outside the Tobin Center, and were all struck by the wording.
“Honoring the mothers whose sons fought in the world war.
Erected by San Antonio Chapter No. 2, 1938.”
“the world war”.
This one’s just for fun. I saw this in front of a restaurant we went to, and I know someone who would appreciate it. They did, but I thought the rest of you might get a kick out of it as well.
…and you don’t mess around with The Joy of Cooking.
Shot: Brian Wansink, a professor at Cornell University (he runs the “Food and Brand Lab”) published a paper in 2009: “The Joy of Cooking Too Much”.
The people currently behind Joy were a little upset by this, and a little skeptical. But they didn’t really get fed up until 2015. They started looking at Wansink’s research and found that some of his claims didn’t quite add up.
Recently, Buzzfeed came into the picture:
Here’s the Buzzfeed article.
And here’s chaser #1: Wansink’s paper has been retracted. Per “Retraction Watch”, this is retraction number 17 for Wansink.
Chaser #2: Wansink has been found guilty of academic misconduct, and has “resigned” effective June 2019.
We are seeing unconfirmed rumors that the Weekly Standard is shutting down, or will be shutting down very soon (after December 14th).
It isn’t clear if this is just the print magazine, or both the magazine and the website. It also isn’t clear what this will mean for me, Al Franken “Tuesday Morning Quarterback”.
Losing his column in the middle of an NFL season wouldn’t exactly be unprecedented for Easterbrook, but (as far as we are aware) this would be the first time it has happened because the publication shut down.
We plan to keep a weather eye on the situation, and will be checking Easterbrook’s Twitter feed for updates.
If we had thought ahead (and hadn’t been putting out fires all day long) we would have scheduled this week’s TMQ Watch to post at 4:20 PM.
Why? After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Fred Hoiberg out as head coach of the Chicago Bulls. Since Chicago still has two newspapers, here’s the Sun Times story.
And the Carolina Panthers fired two defensive assistants (defensive line coach Brady Hoke and assistant secondary coach Jeff Imamura).
Ken Berry, noted television actor. (“Mama’s Family”, “Mayberry R.F.D.”, “Dr. Kildare”, and he did a bunch of work on “Fantasy Island”, among his other credits.)
Yeah, I was going to put up the “F Troop” opening credits, but you know what? The paper of record beat me to it.
Mike McCarthy out as head coach of the Green Bay Packers.
The Pack is not exactly noted for random coach shuffles, but McCarthy was 4-7-1 this season, lost to Arizona on Sunday, and Green Bay is pretty much out of the playoffs for the second season in a row.
McCarthy is 125-77-2 overall in 13 seasons, 10-8 in the playoffs, and has one Super Bowl win (and three NFC Championship losses) to his credit.
I don’t think he’s a bad coach, and someone’s going to be lucky to get him. But it does seem like it just wasn’t working out in Green Bay.
Terry Bowden done as coach of the University of Akron Zips. 35-52 overall, 4-8 (2-6 in conference) this season.
Lady Trumpington (Jean Alys Campbell-Harris).
She was a member of the House of Lords from 1980 to 2017, and held various other governmental positions.
But she gets her obit linked here because she was one of the Bletchley Park codebreakers.
This month, she was among a group of Bletchley Park veterans awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor, for their contributions to the liberation of France.
“Oh, I had such fun in Paris after the war,” she said after receiving the medal in a ceremony at her home. “While this award recognized my time at Bletchley, I still find it difficult to discuss my time there, as we were taught to never talk about it.”
…
During her husband’s tenure at the Leys School in Cambridge, Lady Trumpington kept up her society habits. “I smoked and drank and did everything naughty,” she said.
Once, when presenting awards to Leys athletes, she jumped fully clothed into the school’s swimming pool, followed by the students. “My husband was furious,” she said.
NFL announcers are maroons. At least, according to Gregg Easterbrook.
Why?
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
For the historical record: Stephen Hillenburg, creator of “SpongeBob SquarePants”.
Jeeez. 57 is way too young. Also, ALS stinks.
For the historical record, because I really have nothing to say about the man: Bernardo Bertolucci.
He was a personal hero of mine, but I never met him or even saw him perform. Somehow, it seems like he never came through Austin. (A friend of mine told me a great story about seeing him live: I hope that person will post that story on their own blog.)
I’ve said before that my three favorite magicians are Penn, Teller, and Ricky Jay. But I admired Jay as a magic historian as well.
NYT. The legendary New Yorker profile.
It is the Daileys’ impression—a perception shared by other dealers in rare books and incunabula—that Jay spends a higher proportion of his disposable income on rare books and artifacts than anyone else they know. His friend Janus Cercone has described him as “an incunable romantic.”
“Probably, no matter how much money he had, he would be overextended bibliomaniacally—or should the word be ‘bibliographically’? Anyway, he’d be overextended,” William Dailey has said. “The first time I met him, I recognized him as a complete bibliomaniac. He’s not a complete monomaniac about books on magic, but within that field he is remarkably focussed. His connoisseurship is impeccable, in that he understands the entire context of a book’s emergence. He’s not just interested in the book’s condition. He knows who printed it, and he knows the personal struggle the author went through to get it printed.”
I don’t know what else I can say, except that the world is a smaller, colder, and less interesting place today.
How about that Chiefs-Rams game on Monday night?
If you didn’t like the Chiefs at Rams game, then you don’t like football.
And didn’t someone write something a while back about how ESPN gets stuck with bad games?
After the jump, the rest of this week’s TMQ…
Catching up:
Bob McNair, owner of the Houston Texans. NYT.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Does his family sell the team for tax reasons? If so, do they sell it to someone in Houston? Who? Tillman Fertitta?
Nicolas Roeg, noted director. The only thing of his I’ve watched is “The Man Who Fell To Earth” back over thirty years ago. (Lawrence, last night: “How long was the version you watched? Two hours or three?” Me: “I think it was four days.”) I just bought “Don’t Look Now” on Criterion (but we’re saving that for next October), and I’ve had the DVD of “Walkabout” for quite a while now but haven’t watched it…
Larry Fedora fired as head coach at the University of North Carolina.
UNC was 2-9 this season and 3-9 last year. Fedora was 45-43 overall in seven seasons, and 28-28 in conference.
Kliff Kingsbury is apparently done at Texas Tech, though this is being couched as “sources say”. There was supposed to be a press conference an hour ago.
35-40 overall in six seasons and 19-35 in Big 12 games.
The Red Raiders lost to Baylor 35-24 on Saturday, ending their third consecutive losing season and fourth in five years.
Under Kingsbury, the Red Raiders also failed to break .500 every year in Big 12 play, extending that streak to nine seasons in a row.
Andrew Fitzgerald passed away last week at the age of 87.
There’s a chance you may have heard of Mr. Fitzgerald. He was the last surviving member of the four man crew of the Coast Guard lifeboat CG-36500.
At 5:50 AM on February 18, 1952, the oil tanker Pendleton broke in half off Cape Cod during a severe storm. The crew of the CG-36500 went out and rescued 32 out of 33 men off the stern half of the ship. (One man drowned during the rescue, and the eight men who were in the bow were also lost at sea.)
There are a lot of people who think this is one of the greatest rescues in the history of the Coast Guard. I can’t do it justice here. You should really go read the entire obituary. There’s also a 2016 Disney film (which I haven’t seen), “The Finest Hours”, based on the book by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman.
In 2002, a 50th-anniversary reunion of the rescue crew was held at the historic Mariners House in Boston’s North End. The four also returned to Chatham for an outing on the CG-36500. Mr. Maske died in 2003, Mr. Livesey in 2007 and Mr. Webber in 2009.
The inscription on their Coast Guard medals read, “In testimony of heroic deeds in saving life from the perils of water.”
She was most famous as Harriet Oleson, Nellie’s mother on “Little House on the Prairie”. But she did have a bit of a career before that: an uncredited role in “On the Waterfront”, guest shots on “Emergency”, “Ironside”…
…and, yes, she was in two episodes of “Mannix”: “The World Between” and “Run Till Dark”.
A few things I’ve stumbled across over the past couple of days:
“I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It.” In which the author visits 30 cities, eats 330 burgers, names a burger place in Portand as having the best burger in the country…and five months later, the places closes.
I like this story: it’s a good discussion of the impact of criticism on dining establishments, especially smaller ones. But it’s also frustrating: as it turns out, there was more going on with the burger place than just simply being named “best burger in the country”.
Recently retweeted by Popehat:
Okay. History time!
You’ve probably seen photos of Commonwealth war cemeteries, with rows of white graves. They’re heartbreaking images.
What you DON’T see are the thousands of small, tragic stories on each gravestone.
So I’m going to share some with you here. /1 #history #WW1 pic.twitter.com/wr3ucIyMYZ
— John Bull (@garius) October 5, 2018
I don’t like and don’t read the Huffington Post. But this (also by way of Popehat):
Glybera is a drug developed in Canada. It’s a hugely effective treatment for a rare genetic condition, lipoprotein lipase disorder. People with this disorder can’t metabolize fat. Their blood literally turns white from all the suspended fat in their bloodstream.
One round of treatment with Glybera can fix this genetic condition. Only 31 people have ever been treated with the drug, and it is no longer available.
Why? One possible reason: a round of treatment costs one million dollars. (But a round of treatment, as far as anyone’s been able to determine, is a permanent cure. This is a drug that literally edits genes.) And this isn’t a “oh, health care in the US stinks” story: the drug was only used in Canada and Europe, pretty much on an experimental basis, before it was pulled.
On the historic significance of “Hee Haw”:
A few words on Hee Haw, following Roy Clark’s passing…
It is, possibly, one of the most interesting and important shows in American television history.
Really.
I’m not talking about its jokes or production. Many other things made it interesting and important.
Here goes…
— Gabe Bullard (@gbullard) November 16, 2018