Shot:
Chaser:
Bagatelle (#55 in a series).
January 28th, 2022Obit watch: January 28, 2022.
January 28th, 2022Dr. Johan Hultin. He was 97.
Back in 1950, Dr. Hultin, a pathologist, was having lunch with William Hale, a microbiologist. As the conversation often does, it turned to the 1918 flu pandemic.
Dr. Hale mentioned that there was just one way to figure out what caused the 1918 pandemic: finding victims buried in permafrost and isolating the virus from lungs that might be still frozen and preserved.
Dr. Hultin, a medical student in Sweden who was spending six months at the university, immediately realized that he was uniquely positioned to do just that. The previous summer, he and his first wife, Gunvor, spent weeks assisting a German paleontologist, Otto Geist, on a dig in Alaska. Dr. Geist could help him find villages in areas of permafrost that also had good records of deaths from the 1918 flu.
So Dr. Hultin went north to Alaska in 1951.
Three villages seemed like they might have what he wanted, but when he arrived at the first two, the victims’ graves were no longer in permafrost.
The third village on his list, Brevig Mission, was different. The flu had devastated the village, killing 72 out of 80 Inuit residents. Their bodies were buried in a mass grave with a large wooden cross at either end.
When Dr. Hultin arrived and politely explained his mission, the village council agreed to let him dig. Four days later, he saw his first victim.
“She was a little girl, about 6 to 10 years old. She was wearing a dove gray dress, the one she had died in,” he recalled in an interview in the late 1990s. The child’s hair was braided and tied with bright red ribbons. Dr. Hultin called for help from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the group eventually found four more bodies.
They stopped digging. “We had enough,” Dr. Hultin said.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) Dr. Hultin wasn’t able to culture virus from the samples he collected at the time. But in 1997:
…sitting by a pool on vacation with his wife in Costa Rica, he noticed a paper published in Science by Dr. Jeffery K. Taubenberger, now chief of the viral pathogenesis and evolution section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
It reported a remarkable discovery. Dr. Taubenberger had searched a federal repository of pathology samples dating to the 1860s and found fragments of the 1918 virus in snippets of lung tissue from two soldiers who had died in that pandemic. The tissue had been removed at autopsy, wrapped in paraffin and stored in the warehouse.
Dr. Hultin got in touch with Dr. Taubenberger.
“I can’t go this week, but maybe I can go next week,” he told Dr. Taubenberger.
He went back and recovered more samples.
Dr. Taubenberger got all of the packages. The lung tissue from the Brevig woman was invaluable, he said, because the snippets of lung from the soldiers had so little virus that, with the technology at the time, the effort to get the complete viral sequence would have been delayed by at least a decade.
Using the tissue Dr. Hultin provided, Dr. Taubenberger’s group published a paper that provided the genetic sequence of a crucial gene, hemagglutinin, which the virus had used to enter cells. The group subsequently used that tissue to determine the complete sequence of all eight of the virus’s genes.
One of the things that truly impresses me about this story (besides the scientific angle) is Dr. Hultin’s interactions with the villagers of Brevig Mission. They let him dig up the graves and take samples: and they let him do this because he treated the bodies with honor and respect.
Obit watch: January 27, 2022.
January 27th, 2022Don Wilson, of the Ventures.
In addition to their success in the United States (where their other hits included “Walk — Don’t Run, ’64,” a remake of their own hit that also made Billboard’s Top 10), the Ventures became wildly popular in Japan — so much so, Mr. Wilson said, that numerous bands there took to imitating them. That led to an uncomfortable surprise when the band made its second trip there, its first as headliners, in 1965.
“We had an opening group,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, “and they played all of our songs before we went on.”
We’re talking about the Ventures, so you know what that means, right?
Jim Drake, one of the old time Sports Illustrated photographers. I wanted to mention this here because there’s a lot of classic Drake photos reproduced in the obit, including the one of Broadway Joe in Times Square.
Morgan Stevens, actor. He was “Nick Diamond” on “Melrose Place”. He was also “David Reardon” in “Fame” and did other TV guest spots.
Kevin Ward, the mayor of Hyattsville, Maryland, which is a DC suburb. He was found dead in a park: his death is suspected to have been a suicide.
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 good page of additional resources.
Dr. Rockzo, call your office, please.
January 27th, 2022
Followup.
January 27th, 2022A few weeks ago, I wrote up an after-action report on John Hearne’s classes at KR Training.
Michael Bane was also in Mr. Hearne’s class, and recorded an interview with him. That interview is now posted on his web site, for your information and edification.
The whole thing is a little over 20 minutes, but not all of that is Mr. Hearne, so you can probably fit this in to a coffee break.
Hattip: KR Training on the book of face.
Personal note: Mr. Hearne and I have corresponded a bit by email since I wrote that after action report, and our correspondence just confirms my original opinion: he’s a swell guy, who went out of his way to answer my questions. Again, if you have the chance, take his courses.
Obit watch: January 26, 2022.
January 26th, 2022He voiced Charlie Brown in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”. According to reports, he was 65 years old, and died by suicide.
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 good page of additional resources.
Kathryn Kates, actress. Roles include “Seinfeld”, “Orange Is the New Black”, and “Law and Order: Sport Utility Vehicle”.
This got past me yesterday, though I did intend to mention it: Sheldon Silver, former leader of the New York State Assembly who was serving time in prison on corruption charges.
Obit watch: January 25, 2022.
January 25th, 2022She was “Harriet Conklin” in “Our Miss Brooks”, a series I hate to say was before my time. Other credits are pretty limited: she appeared in the “Centennial” mini-series, Michael Ritchie’s “Smile”, and some TV guest shots.
Important safety tip (#23 in a series)
January 23rd, 2022This is something I did not know, but a person close to WCD mentioned it to me. The Texas Comptroller’s office confirms it.
Gun safes in Texas are exempt from sales tax.
Actually, it isn’t just gun safes:
So if I ever buy one of those Hornady lock boxes for my car…tax free, baby!
(Seriously, I was going back and forth on one of those for a while, so I could stash my gun in my car while I was at the office. Then the Chinese Rabies hit. Now I have no idea when I’m going back to the office, so buying one seems pointless.)
Obit watch: January 23, 2022.
January 23rd, 2022I think a lot of people (outside of firefighting) have forgotten that name, but Report from Engine Co. 82 was a huge deal back in the day.
The book sold some three million copies, ennobled Mr. Smith as a champion of his profession and inspired countless men and women to become firefighters.
“The author’s pride clearly derives not from his writing, but from his job as a firefighter — the most hazardous job of all, according to the National Safety Council,” Anatole Broyard wrote in his Times book review. “The risk one takes in, writing a book — and there are those who will tell you that this is the most hazardous occupation — must seem comparatively small to him. One hopes he will go on taking it.”
I read it at an inappropriately young age. I won’t say how old I was, but “Emergency” was on first-run network television at the time. The thing that sticks with me all these years later is how much abuse Smith and his colleagues took from the people they were trying to help.
Mr. Smith was a Renaissance firefighter.
He played eight musical instruments; founded Firehouse magazine in 1976 (and sold it in 1991 and made $7 million); was the founding chairman of the New York City Fire Museum and was instrumental in converting the Engine Company 30 firehouse in SoHo as its site; was president and chairman of the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club, which moved from Manhattan to the South Bronx; and was a chairman of the New York Academy of Art.
He was the first chairman of the International Association of Fire Chiefs’ Near Miss task force, focused on preventing firefighter injuries and deaths, and won awards from the Congressional Fire Services Institute and the National Fire Academy, and the New York Fire Department.
Any man who tries to prevent deaths and injuries in his chosen occupation, no matter what that is, deserves mad props in my opinion.
In a Times opinion essay in 1971, Mr. Smith recalled his ebullience at the prospect of becoming a firefighter: “I would play to the cheers of excited hordes — climbing ladders, pulling hose, and saving children from the waltz of the hot masked devil. I paused and fed the fires of my ego — tearful mothers would kiss me, editorial writers would extol me in lofty phrases, and mayors would pin ribbons to my breast.”
After eight years, he wrote, the romantic visions had faded.
“I have climbed a thousand ladders, and crawled Indian fashion down as many halls into a deadly nightshade of smoke, a whirling darkness of black poison, knowing all the while that the ceiling may fall, or the floor collapse, or a hidden explosive ignite,” Mr. Smith added. “I have watched friends die, and I have carried death in my hands. With good reason have Christians chosen fire as the metaphor of hell.”
“There is no excitement, no romance, in being this close to death,” he wrote, later adding: “Yet, I know that I could not do anything else with such a great sense of accomplishment.”
I’ve gone back and forth for a few days about whether I should include the obit for Ann Arensberg. There was finally one thing that tipped me over the edge.
That wasn’t the tipping point. This was:
I’m sorry to laugh at someone’s obit, but “As You Like It” with seals kicks over my giggle box. Indeed, it has me thinking about a whole line of Shakespeare productions with animals. An all-racoon production of “Macbeth”?
Obit watch: January 22, 2022.
January 22nd, 2022Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk. Tricycle:
Known to his thousands of followers worldwide as Thây—Vietnamese for teacher—Nhat Hanh was widely considered among Buddhists as second only to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama in the scope of his global influence. The author of some 100 books—75 in English—he founded nine monasteries and dozens of affiliated practice centers, and inspired the creation of thousands of local mindfulness communities. Nhat Hanh is credited with popularizing mindfulness and “engaged Buddhism” (he coined the term), teachings that not only are central to contemporary Buddhist practice but also have penetrated the mainstream. For many years, Thich Nhat Hanh has been a familiar sight the world over, leading long lines of people in silent “mindful” walking meditation.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of Thich Nhat Hanh’s role in the development of Buddhism in the West, particularly in the United States. He was arguably the most significant catalyst for the Buddhist community’s engagement with social, political, and environmental concerns. Today, this aspect of Western Buddhism is widely accepted, but when Nhat Hanh began teaching regularly in North America, activism was highly controversial in Buddhist circles, frowned upon by most Buddhist leaders, who considered it a distraction from the focus on awakening. At a time when Western Buddhism was notably parochial, Nhat Hanh’s nonsectarian view motivated many teachers to reach out and build bonds with other dharma communities and traditions. It would not be an exaggeration to say that his inclusive vision laid the groundwork for the flourishing of Buddhist publications, including Tricycle, over the past 35 years.
I am not a Buddhist, and I am spectacularly bad at Zen. But I enjoy reading about Zen, and I was familiar with him from my reading.
Thich Nhat Hanh dismissed the idea of death. “Birth and death are only notions,” he wrote in his book “No Death, No Fear.” “They are not real.”
He added: “The Buddha taught that there is no birth; there is no death; there is no coming; there is no going; there is no same; there is no different; there is no permanent self; there is no annihilation. We only think there is.”
“Nhat Hanh is my Brother” by Thomas Merton.
Breck Denny, writer and actor. He was only 34: according to his family, he died of a “rare spontaneous splenic artery rupture”.
Obit watch: January 21, 2022.
January 21st, 2022Marvin Lee Aday, also known as “Meat Loaf”. THR. NYPost. IMDB.
(I can’t confirm it now, but I remember a legend that the NYT did a story about Meat Loaf…and, as is their custom on second and subsequent reference, referred to him as “Mr. Loaf”.)
Edited to add 1/22: Since I posted this obit, the NYT has added a note to their coverage discussing the “Mr. Loaf” story. They assert it is not true. And apparently he preferred to be called “Meat”:
A Hollywood Meatloaf story on the day of his departure.
So, in the early naught years I managed a softball team named The Big Walrus (just because) and on said team was friend, actor and musician @WEarlBrown.
He played first base for us.
Well, one day… (1of3)
— Jeffrey Lieber (@JeffLieber) January 21, 2022
…
Sort of a firings watch.
January 20th, 2022I covered the firing of Kevin Ollie as men’s basketball coach at the University of Connecticut when it happened.
Now…
…
Irvings ruled that Ollie is due $11,157,032.95 within next 10 business days, Parenteau said.
Interestingly, though, those recruiting violations did pan out:
…
Parenteau and co-counsel William Madsen had argued that UConn failed to meet its burden under an agreement between the school and the American Association of University Professors, of which Ollie is a member. That agreement required a showing of serious misconduct in order to fire an employee for “just cause” and also affords Ollie other union protections.
The school had argued that Ollie’s transgressions were serious and that his individual contract superseded those union protections.
Obit watch: January 20, 2022.
January 20th, 2022Hardy Kruger (also billed as Hardy Krüger). Sloppy obit from THR.
His character in “The Flight of the Phoenix” was not a German solider or a Nazi baddie, and that movie came out in 1965, not 1975. But he was excellent in it. (Noted: Criterion is releasing it on blu-ray in March. Affiliate link.)
Edited to add: THR corrected their obit shortly after I posted this. It no longer refers to Kruger’s character in “Phoenix” as a German solider, and has the correct date for the movie.
Edited to add 2: NYT obit, which was not up when I first posted.
He was also good in “Barry Lyndon”. I’ve seen “The Wild Geese”, but cut up for TV a long time ago, and I’d like to watch it again.
Carol Speed. Credits include “The Mack” and “Disco Godfather”.
Ron Franklin, fomer ESPN announcer.
The time has come around again.
January 20th, 2022Namely: Happy National Buy an AK Day!
Classic Firearms appears to have a few AK pattern rifles in 7.62×39 in stock, if you’re looking. (I don’t get any kickback from those people.)
Important safety tip (#22 in a series)
January 19th, 2022Lawrence brought up an important safety tip the other night, based on two documentaries the Saturday Movie Group has watched. (“Barry Lyndon” and “Gone With the Wind”.)
Don’t buy a horse for your child.
It never ends well.
(Did you know IMDB has a “riding accident” keyword?)