Noted.

August 15th, 2025

A while back, I wrote, in the context of the Connor Stalions “sign stealing” scandal:

Realistically, if this is substantiated, I suspect major loss of scholarships, a ban on post-season play, and possibly for Harbaugh to get a “show-cause penalty“.

The NCAA has handed down their penalty. No post-season ban, and no wins erased, but Michigan is getting hit with fines “that could eclipse $30 million”.

The NCAA also imposed an additional game suspension for coach Sherrone Moore, which will be served for the first game of the 2026 season. Moore is expected to serve a two-game suspension in the upcoming season, which ESPN reported in May that the university proposed to self-impose. He also received a two-year show-cause penalty.

…

The NCAA committee also levied an eight-year show-cause penalty for former Michigan staffer Connor Stalions and a 10-year show-cause for ex-coach Jim Harbaugh, who is now in the NFL. Those essentially act as barriers to schools hiring them in the future. Harbaugh’s new 10-year show-cause penalty will not begin until after he serves a current four-year show-cause from a previous NCAA case.

…

The size of the fine is expected to be considerable, although a finite amount will not be immediately available. It includes a $50,000 initial levy, 10% of the football budget, 10% of the cost of football scholarships for the 2025 season, and the loss of all postseason competition revenue sharing for the 2025 and 2026 seasons. That sum could easily eclipse $30 million.
Though there are variables on how much teams get from football postseason revenue, sources expect that number alone based on past Big Ten income and projections to be more than $20 million. Some of that will depend on the performance of both Michigan and the Big Ten. The football budget in 2024 was more than $70 million, which means the amount is likely to be at least $7 million for that part of the fine, depending on updated budgets.

Also, Denard Robinson, who is a former assistant coach, got a three year “show cause” for what are apparently unrelated recruiting violations.

Michigan and its coaches and staffers were charged with six Level 1 violations in the sign-stealing case, which are the most serious. The decision to fine the school heavily but not issue a penalty such as a postseason ban indicates a shift in NCAA enforcement rulings away from postseason prohibitions.

Posted in Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 15, 2025.

August 15th, 2025

Gerry Spence, legendary lawyer and author. He was 96.

Among the people he defended or represented: Karen Silkwood.

She had died in 1974 in a car crash on her way to talk to a reporter about flaws in safety practices in the production of plutonium at a Kerr-McGee plant in Oklahoma, where she had worked and become contaminated. Representing her family in their suit claiming negligence, Mr. Spence won $10.5 million in damages. (The case was later settled for $1.38 million — about $6.6 million today.)

Randy Weaver.

While rejecting Mr. Weaver’s racist beliefs, Mr. Spence argued that his client had acted in self-defense and raised doubts about whose bullet had killed the agent. The jury acquitted Mr. Weaver of all major charges but convicted him of failing to appear at a 1991 weapons trial. He was sentenced to time served; Mr. Spence did not appeal.

Imelda Marcos.

The 1990 New York racketeering trial of Mrs. Marcos made headlines for months. Prosecutors produced thousands of pages of bank records, telexes, receipts, memos, contracts and reports, calling them a trail of thievery. But Mr. Spence broke through with simplicity, calling his client “a lonely widow” and “a small, fragile woman” whose only crime was being “a world-class shopper.” She was found innocent.

…

Mr. Spence often boasted that he had never lost a criminal case with a jury trial, as either a defense lawyer or a prosecutor, and that he had not lost a civil case since 1969. That was not actually true, but it was not far off. He was known to lose now and then, and several of his notable civil verdicts were overturned on appeal.
But in the tradition of Perry Mason, he seemed unbeatable — not only to courtroom foes but also to lawyers who attended his seminars, and to Americans who read his best-selling books and tuned in to his television programs and network commentaries, most notably on the O.J. Simpson murder case.

I remember seeing a “60 Minutes” profile of him some years back. I can’t find that now, but there’s a two-part interview with him on the ‘Tube.

Masaoki Sen. He was 102.

Mr. Sen was best known for serving as the 15th-generation grand master of the Urasenke, one of the three main schools of Japan’s tea ceremony. After inheriting the role from his father in 1964, he used it as a platform to promote peace, often while speaking of his own experiences during the war.
Traveling the world to engage in a sort of tea-ceremony diplomacy, Mr. Sen used the ancient art, whose roots lie in Zen Buddhism, to call for an end to all wars. He was known for the phrase “peacefulness through a bowl of tea.”

He was also a former kamikaze pilot.

After leaving Doshisha University in 1943 he was drafted to the Imperial Navy, where he trained to be a pilot. When his unit was asked to form a “special attack” squadron to carry out suicide missions, Mr. Sen was one of the volunteers.
“I thought I was ready to die,” Mr. Sen said in a 2021 interview with a Japanese newspaper. “But I was just a greenhorn of 20 or 21 years of age. I didn’t know what death meant.”
While many young men in his unit flew off to ram their aircraft into Allied ships, Mr. Sen was never sent. Historians say the Japanese military often spared the oldest sons, especially from historically significant households.
After the war, Mr. Sen asked a former commander why he was never sent. The older man answered: “Just think of it as fate.”
Unlike many war veterans, Mr. Sen spoke openly of his experiences and sorrow for comrades who never returned. He also made no effort to disguise his anger toward his nation’s leaders who sent them on one-way missions.
“We were told to die because others would fill our ranks,” he said in another interview. “But who wants to die?”

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

Reminder.

August 15th, 2025

The Catholic Church has more compassion for people who have died by suicide than science fiction fandom.

Posted in Religion | Comments Closed

I’m still here.

August 14th, 2025

There just hasn’t been much I’ve felt like blogging about. No obits that I’ve thought were sufficiently notable.

I still can’t upload images to the blog, so no gun book blogging and no random gun crankery. Bluehost support has been as useless as teats on a boar hog, and I’m planning to migrate the blog over to Siteground. The problem is, I want to be fully here when the migration gets done, and I’ve been wrapped up in so many things outside the blog that I haven’t been able to coordinate the migration yet. I expect to do that towards the end of the month.

(I will be leaving town for a few days the later part of next week.)

One thing I will mention in passing: I have rejoined the Richard the III Society. I’ve been an off-and-on member, but I had let my membership lapse. However, this came up when the Saturday Movie Group was watching “Richard III“: Lawrence was somewhat astounded when I told him I had been a member, so I decided I’d sign up again.

(I recommend “Richard III” for two reasons. One, Ian McKellen is great in it. Two, the whole movie is just absolutely bat guano insane, and I loved every minute of it.)

(And, as everyone knows, I am a sucker for lost causes and beautiful women. One of those explains my membership in the Richard the III Society.)

A very brief gun related note: Leupold no longer makes any pistol scopes, and says they don’t have any plans to introduce new ones in the future. As best as Mike the Musicologist and I can tell, Burris is your only option for a pistol scope at the moment.

Posted in Admin, Guns, History, Movies | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 9, 2025.

August 9th, 2025

Captain James A. Lovell Jr. (USN – ret.) NASA page.

Captain Lovell, a former Navy test pilot, flew for some 715 hours in space, the most of any astronaut in the pioneering Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs forged by the United States as it vied with the Soviet Union to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.
He took part in two Gemini missions that orbited Earth and was one of the three astronauts aboard Apollo 8, the first spaceflight to orbit the moon, before he was chosen by NASA for Apollo 13.

I’m sure all my readers know what happened with Apollo 13. If you don’t, there’s a really good movie about Apollo 13, and a lot of details in the obit.

It isn’t everyone who gets Tom Hanks to play them in a movie. (And Jim Lovell played the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, which gives him a Bacon number of 1.)

Captain Lovell’s first space mission came in December 1965 when he orbited Earth with Lt. Col. Frank Borman in Gemini 7, a flight of more than 330 hours that included the first rendezvous of two manned spacecraft, the type of maneuver that would have to be carried out for a moon landing.
Captain Lovell commanded Gemini 12 in November 1966, flying with Maj. Buzz Aldrin of the Air Force, who in July 1969 became the second man to walk on the moon, after Neil Armstrong, in the flight of Apollo 11.
Gemini 12 carried out 59 orbits of Earth over four days to close out the Gemini program.
Captain Lovell was the command module pilot on the six-day journey of Apollo 8 at Christmastime 1968, joining with Colonel Borman and Maj. William A. Anders as the first men to orbit the moon, looping around it 10 times.

William H. Webster, former head of both the CIA and the FBI.

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Drink!

August 6th, 2025

Shot:

A merchant’s sheltered but cheerful daughter, fighting to control a fire spirit that lives inside her, and a grieving half-orc warrior, who, like many an orc of his kind, has green skin and tusks, fall madly in love while he escorts her to marry a prince in a far-off kingdom. During their journey, the human and the half-orc have a lot of raunchy sex.
It sounds like a fever dream, but it’s actually the plot of “Tusk Love,” a romance novel that landed on the New York Times best-seller list last month. How the book got there is as twisty as the novel’s central love affair — and the latest, and perhaps most unusual, example of how internet-driven fandom can intersect with publishing to create hit books.

Chaser:

Spicy bar snack: I, Libertine Kindle edition on Amazon. Wikipedia.

Posted in Bagatelle, Books, Kindleing | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: August 4, 2025.

August 4th, 2025

Loni Anderson. NYT.

“WKRP” was a great show, and she was a big part of what made it great. (“And, as we know, Jennifer was the smartest person in the room.” Yes, Jennifer was smart, and I’d even agree deceptively smart. But “smartest person in the room”? Hello, Bailey Quarters. Hello, Venus Flytrap. That’s another one of the things that made “WKRP” great: multiple smart people.)

Edited to add: I probably should have put in an IMDB link. Especially since Lawrence asked:

Who is killing the cast of “3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain”?

Rahaman Ali. Long time readers know I don’t like covering people just because of their relationship with other famous people. But Mr. Ali has an interesting story.

He was Muhammad Ali’s brother.

Rahaman Ali was a promising amateur boxer who won his first professional fight in an undercard bout the same evening that his brother beat Liston to become the world heavyweight champion. Rahaman went on to earn a middling record of 10 wins, three losses and one draw. He retired after a technical knockout in 1972.
Several figures from the brothers’ youth later said in interviews that Rahaman Ali had been a clever, coachable fighter who just lacked Muhammad’s charisma. When a group of Louisville businessmen got together to sponsor Muhammad, then known as Cassius Clay, they left Rahaman, then Rudy Clay, out of the deal. (The two brothers changed their names and joined the Nation of Islam around the same time in the early 1960s.)

He gave up his career to become part of Muhammad’s entourage, serving as “chauffeur, sparring partner, gofer, chef and cornerman”. Also human wristwatch, because Muhammad wouldn’t wear one: he’d just ask Rahaman for the time.

In 1990, speaking to The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Rahaman Ali expressed regret for not having focused on his own boxing career.
After his own bouts, “Muhammad never said, ‘Good fight, good fight, Rahaman,’” Rahaman said. “I feel he could have come back and congratulated me.”

…

Mr. Eig wrote that though Muhammad Ali had once promised always to provide for his brother, Rahaman had begun to live in poverty after a falling-out with Lonnie, Muhammad’s fourth and final wife.
He was sometimes described showing up to Ali Center events attended by his brother yet hardly speaking to him, instead wandering around to introduce himself as “Muhammad Ali’s brother.” Mr. Eig described one such occasion in 2015. Rahaman was not among the list of eminences who got a private audience with Muhammad. Afterward, he walked from table to table, collecting small decorative photographs of Muhammad and putting them into a shopping bag.

Flaco Jiménez, Tex-Mex accordion player. This isn’t my style of music, but even I’d heard of Flaco Jiménez. He was just that big a deal.

David Rendall, operatic tenor. I find this noteworthy because he had a series of…issues? Accidents?

In April 2005, Mr. Rendall was singing Radamès in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen when part of the stage collapsed, destroying the set. He was “knocked down at least 15 feet and tried to crawl to safety to avoid being crushed,” he later told The Telegraph of London. “I thought I was going to die,” a fate that awaits Radamès in the opera but is not normally faced by tenors singing the role.
Mr. Rendall had knee and hip replacements and surgery to his shoulder after the accident. Directors stopped calling, and he had to put his home up for sale. “I can’t do what some directors want onstage,” he told the British newspaper The Telegraph. He received some compensation from the theater but sued anyway.

Before that he nearly killed his singing partner.

Mr. Rendall was singing Canio in “I Pagliacci” in Milwaukee in November 1998 — his ringing performance of the great Act I aria “Vesti la giubba” is particularly noteworthy — when he nearly stabbed to death the baritone Kimm Julian.
The last scene includes, in the libretto, just such a stabbing, when Canio kills Silvio, the lover of his unfaithful wife.
“I’d been given my props when we started rehearsing, and these included a knife for the stabbing scene,” Mr. Rendall later told The New York Times. “At the crucial moment, just as I’d done 12 times before, I pushed the button to make the blade retract. But when I looked down, I saw to my amazement that the blade was still out.”
Mr. Julian, blood-soaked, collapsed. The blade had gone three inches into his chest and narrowly missed killing him.

The remaining performances of the show sold out. Mr. Julian made a full recovery. Mr. Rendall was questioned by the police, but ultimately released.

Posted in 1970s, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 1, 2025.

August 1st, 2025

Cécile Dionne, of the Dionne quintuplets.

I suspect most of my readers are passingly familiar with this story, but if you’re not, I recommend reading the obit. In brief, the quintuplets were made wards of the state after their birth and placed on public display by the doctor who delivered some of them.

[Dr. Allan Ray Dafoe] teamed up with province officials to create a gilded prison for the infants, a vast compound known as Quintland. An observation balcony was built so that the girls could be viewed by tourists, who numbered as many as 6,000 a day, many of them buying bumper stickers that read, “We have seen the Dionne quintuplets.” Behind a seven-foot-tall barbed-wire fence and protected from both germs and kidnappers, the babies were isolated from all companions or relatives except one another.

They were left with emotional scars from the experience, and possibly from parental abuse after their parents regained custody. Emilie Dionne died in a convent at the age of 20. Marie Dionne died at 36.

In 1995, when they were past 60, the three surviving quintuplets said in a ghostwritten book that their father had sexually abused them as teenagers — an accusation that their other siblings denied and that some critics suggested had been motivated by a hope that the book would be a big success. It wasn’t.
But the sisters had sued the province of Ontario for compensation, and after a public uproar, they received a $2.8 million settlement, which seemed to secure their financial future.
For Cécile, who had worked as a clerk in a supermarket, the solvency was short-lived. Her surviving twin son, Bertrand, helped her buy a duplex apartment, where they lived together for a few years. Then, with Cécile’s health beginning to fail, Bertrand sold the home and moved his mother to a high-end senior residence. But he stopped paying the monthly fees in 2010 and disappeared without a trace.
Impoverished, hobbled after a hip replacement and with failing eyesight because of macular degeneration, Cécile was forced into a shabby old-age home, again a ward of the state. Annette helped her by buying a refrigerator for her room and paying for haircuts. The sisters talked several times a day and, as always, completed each other’s sentences.

Yvonne Dionne died in 2001. With Cécile Dionne’s death, Annette is the last surviving quintuplet.

Posted in History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 31, 2025.

July 31st, 2025

Robert Wilson, “theater director, playwright and visual artist”, and a good Texas boy.

Time was an important element for Mr. Wilson, too. Where playwrights traditionally compressed time in their works, Mr. Wilson expanded it. His stage work “KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE,” which had its premiere in 1972 at the Festival of Arts in Shiraz, Iran, ran 168 hours and was presented over 10 days. Viewers were astonished and outraged to see actors taking hours to complete actions as simple as walking across the stage or slicing an onion.

…

By contrast, Mr. Wilson’s first foray into opera, and his first collaboration with Mr. Glass, “Einstein on the Beach” (1976), is a comparatively trim five-hour work. It has no plot, but its tableaux touches on nuclear power, space travel and even Einstein’s love of playing the violin. And while it has plenty of text — counting sequences, solfège syllables, the lyrics to the pop song “Mr. Bojangles” and sections of poetry and prose by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs — none of it is dialogue. The audience, free to leave and return during a performance, is presented with ideas about Einstein by inference and metaphor rather than directly.

…

“Einstein,” which had its premiere at the Festival d’Avignon in France in July 1976 and was staged at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York that November, has proved to be among the most durable works in Mr. Wilson’s and Mr. Glass’s catalogs. It has been recorded three times and revived regularly, with world tours in 1985, 1992 and 2012-15.

…

Mr. Wilson and Mr. Glass teamed up again, in 1984, to produce “The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down,” the fifth act, called “the Rome Section,” of what was to be a 12-hour opera, with other sections composed by Jo Kondo, David Byrne, Gavin Bryars and others. Because of funding problems, the full work was never produced. But Mr. Wilson and Mr. Glass went on to produce two more operas, “White Raven” and “Monsters of Grace” (both 1998). In 2022, Mr. Wilson produced “H-100 Seconds to Midnight,” a work inspired by the physicist Stephen Hawking, with texts by Etel Adnan and music by Mr. Glass and Dickie Landry.

…

Mr. Wilson’s other notable collaborations include Euripides’s “Alcestis” (1986) with Laurie Anderson; “Cosmopolitan Greetings” (1988) with Allen Ginsberg; a Spirituals recital, “Great Day in the Morning” (1982), and stagings of Schoenberg’s “Erwartung” (1995) and Schubert’s “Winterreise” (2001) for the soprano Jessye Norman; “The Old Woman” (2013) with the choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov and the actor Willem Dafoe; and “Bach 6 Solo,” a staging of Bach’s unaccompanied violin works, played by Jennifer Koh and choreographed by Ms. Childs.
He also worked several times with Lady Gaga, including one work at the Louvre in Paris in 2013 involving what he called “Video Portraits” of her.

Laura Dahlmeier.

Ms. Dahlmeier won the sprint and pursuit events in biathlon at the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and added a bronze in the individual event. In Germany, she had helped boost the popularity of the biathlon, a cross-country ski race in which participants also shoot at targets. She won five gold medals at the 2017 world championships in Hochfilzen, Austria, among a total of seven in her career.

She was 31, and died in a climbing accident in Pakistan.

Posted in Music, Sports, Thanks | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 29, 2025.

July 29th, 2025

Might as well start off my 16th year of “looking at obituaries and which coaches got fired“.

Ryne Sandberg. 65 seems a lot younger to me these days than it did in the past. MLB. Baseball Reference.

This amused me: the context is that Mr. Sandberg signed a contract in 1992 that paid him $28.4 million over four years, which was a lot of money at the time.

As Sports Illustrated put it at the time: “Sandberg is a shy, unassuming guy who is a lock for the Hall of Fame. He doesn’t drink, test positive, ram his wife’s car, kick the dog, walk out of camp or say dumb things to the press. The most controversial thing he does is boot a grounder every 25 games or so.”
On signing the extension, Sandberg remarked, “My face will be sore today from the smile.”
But other club owners weren’t grinning. “I’ve said for years that we’re headed for Armageddon,” Al Rosen, the general manager of the San Francisco Giants, told Sports Illustrated. “But now we’re past the gates. To the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Famine, Pestilence, Death and War — we have added a fifth: Unmitigated Greed. It’s going to do us all in. I can’t see baseball surviving this.”

Posted in Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

My blog is broken. Day 8.

July 28th, 2025

I was busy over the weekend and didn’t have a chance to follow-up with Bluehost. I was planning to do so tonight…

…but Bluehost emailed me! The direct message I sent this morning to Sachin Puri (“CEO @ Bluehost Group”) asking whose leg I had to hump to get some action on this ticket may have been a factor in that.

Summarizing, Bluehost’s latest theory is that: “a script is being terminated due to execution time limits, specifically during image processing handled by WordPress”. Which is actually a reasonable theory, and explains some things: if the script is being terminated because it takes too long to run, there’s probably a connection to server load, and that would explain why some people see the problem intermittently.

Options to Resolve

Resize images before uploading to reduce processing time. (recommended)

Disable image resizing via a plugin

Consider upgrading to a VPS or Dedicated plan, where you have full control over PHP limits and resource usage.

I’m not really interested in adding an “image resizing” step to my workflow, especially when this worked in the past without that step. I’m also not really interested in paying more money to get back to where I was.

Next Steps & Suggestions

To further isolate the issue, we recommend:

Retry the upload using WordPress to confirm if the problem persists on your end.

Which I would love to be able to do. But as I’ve mentioned to my readers, and as I told the Bluehost support rep, they’ve set the maximum file upload size for this instance to ZERO BYTES.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 28, 2025.

July 28th, 2025

Tom Lehrer was wrong.

We did not all go together when we go. He went first.

THR. NYT.

Shunsaku Tamiya, CEO of Tamiya Company.

For more than four decades, Mr. Tamiya led the company that bore his family’s name, turning it into one of the world’s largest makers of build-it-yourself plastic model kits of racecars and military vehicles. Since producing its first such kit in 1960, of the Japanese World War II battleship Yamato, Tamiya Co. has become a globally known brand that also produces remote-controlled cars.

…

The company, which was renamed Tamiya in 1984, also won customers because of the meticulous accuracy of its kits. Mr. Tamiya visited military museums around the world to research archives and take pictures of tanks, warships and aircraft. At locations where photography wasn’t allowed, he memorized the details, recording them in a notebook afterward.
During the Cold War, he got his first up-close look at Soviet tanks at a museum in Israel, which had captured them from Arab countries during the Six-Day War.
His company also built model kits of racing cars as well as radio-controlled cars. To make a miniature replica of a Porsche 911 that was perfect down to the shape and placement of the engine, he bought one of the expensive German sports cars.
He did this “not to drive it, but to use it as a reference,” Mr. Tamiya wrote in a memoir. “I brought the 911 into my garage and disassembled everything that could be disassembled.”

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

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