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…
TMQ Watch: December 4, 2018.
December 4th, 2018Y’all say what?
December 4th, 2018Fred 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).
Obit watch: December 3, 2018.
December 3rd, 2018Ken 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.
Firings watch.
December 3rd, 2018Mike 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.
Obit watch: December 1, 2018.
December 1st, 2018Obit watch: November 30, 2018.
November 30th, 2018Lady 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.
TMQ Watch: November 27, 2018.
November 29th, 2018NFL announcers are maroons. At least, according to Gregg Easterbrook.
Why?
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Obit watch: November 28, 2018.
November 28th, 2018For the historical record: Stephen Hillenburg, creator of “SpongeBob SquarePants”.
Jeeez. 57 is way too young. Also, ALS stinks.
Obit watch: November 27, 2018.
November 27th, 2018For the historical record, because I really have nothing to say about the man: Bernardo Bertolucci.
Ricky Jay.
November 25th, 2018He 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.
TMQ Watch: November 20, 2018.
November 25th, 2018How 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…
Obit watch: November 25, 2018.
November 25th, 2018Catching 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…
Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?
November 25th, 2018Larry 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.
Obit watch: November 20, 2018.
November 20th, 2018Andrew 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.”
Obit watch: November 19, 2018.
November 19th, 2018She 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”.