There’s only room for one and here she comes, here she comes…

January 12th, 2016

I sort of shoved the Bowie roundup to the back of the fridge yesterday, mostly because I felt the coverage had become over-saturated. But I still feel obligated to do something for the historical record.

NYT, which contains links to their extensive coverage. LAT coverage. I know I’m probably being provincial in not linking to a UK paper, but honestly I don’t know which of them is trustworthy these days; if I have any readers in the UKOGBNI who are willing to drop links in comments, please feel free to do so.

Interesting piece from TechDirt about Bowie as music technology visionary.

The A/V Club ran a quick obit, and followed up with a longer “For Our Consideration” piece that’s mostly okay except for the last sentence. Death isn’t “a guise”, and Sean O’Neal should be ashamed of himself for saying that.

I’ve never called myself a Bowie fan, and never spent money to see him live. But when I think about Bowie, I keep thinking about how much of his music I really enjoyed: “Heroes”, “Major Tom”, “Ashes to Ashes”, “Putting Out the Fire”…

It isn’t a great recording, but it is a great song.

Violates my rule about Christmas music, but I think I can make an exception in this case.

Posted in Clippings, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 11, 2016.

January 11th, 2016

Florence King: NYT.

The cultural boils Miss King sought so vigorously to lance included:
Political correctness; feminism (“Feminists will not be satisfied,” she wrote, “until every abortion is performed by a gay black doctor under an endangered tree on a reservation for handicapped Indians”); environmentalism; the antismoking lobby; sentiment; intimacy; weakness; special pleading; lack of breeding (“No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street”); gay liberation; far rightism; far leftism; mild to moderate leftism; democracy (“I believe in a Republic of Merit in which water is allowed to find its own level, where voters, like drivers, are tested before being turned loose”); the Constitution; children (“In order to molest a child you must first be in the same room with a child, and I don’t know how perverts stand it”); the human race.

WP.

Angus Scrimm also passed away over the weekend. He knocked around quite a bit, doing guest shots on various TV series (including “Alias” and “Trapper John M.D.”) and movies. He was perhaps best known as “The Tall Man” from the “Phantasm” movies. Interestingly, he also wrote liner notes for Capitol Records:

During his tenure at Capitol, Scrimm penned liner notes for artists like Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and even the Beatles under the byline “Rory Guy”; he won a Grammy in 1974 for “Best Album Notes, Classical” for Korngold: The Classic Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Even after the success of Phantasm, Scrimm continued to write liner notes.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

With a rebel yell, they cried “More! More! More!”

January 11th, 2016

More firings, that is.

The Houston Texans have fired special teams coordinator Bob Ligashesky, receivers coach Stan Hixon and defensive assistant Anthony Pleasant.

Some friends of ours who shall remain anonymous to protect their privacy (thank you, anonymous friends!) invited folks over on Saturday to watch the Texans playoff game. I was tied up with other events and arrived with only five minutes left in the game, but based on what I heard from my anonymous friends and Lawrence (and what I observed personally in that five minutes), it was a debacle.

Question: have the Texans gone far enough?

Posted in Firings, NFL, Schadenfreude, Sports | Comments Closed

Firings watch (and unrelated note).

January 11th, 2016

Lionel Hollins out as coach of the Nets. The team also “reassigned” General Manager Billy King.

I’ve known about David Bowie for a grand total of five minutes at this point. I want to wait a few hours for the smoke to clear before I post an obit roundup.

Posted in Clippings, Firings, Music, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

One hundred and sixty two.

January 8th, 2016

Somehow “tax-fattened hyena” doesn’t seem fitting, and crustacean related jokes seem inappropriate.

So. Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow: guilty.

On 162 counts, “including murder in the service of racketeering, murder conspiracy and racketeering.”

(They said “murder” and “racketeering” twice. They must like “racketeering”. And “murder”.)

LAT. SFGate. SF Examiner. Of course the defense plans to appeal.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law, Leland "Uncle" Yee | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 8, 2016.

January 8th, 2016

I’m still kind of hoping for an obituary from a more mainstream news source, but Florence King, writer and National Review columnist, has died. Tributes from Tam and Lawrence.

This was a little surprising:

I’m not going to say she was as influential on my writing as P.J.: I came to her relatively late in life. But she was a damn funny writer (even if I can’t quote some of my favorite lines here), and the world is a lesser place for her passing. Frankly, we could do a lot worse than a monarchy. Especially one run by Florence King.

Pat Harrington Jr. A/V Club.

Interesting career. He started out on “The Jack Paar Show” (or “The Steve Allen Show”, depending on which obit you read).

His film credits include “The Wheeler Dealers” (1963) and “Move Over, Darling” (1963), both starring James Garner; “The President’s Analyst” (1967), starring James Coburn; and “Easy Come, Easy Go” (1967), starring Elvis Presley.

Of course, he was most famous as Schneider on “One Day at a Time”.

Ashraf Pahlavi, sister of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

According to an internal secret history of the C.I.A., she also played a crucial role in the British- and American-inspired military coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and restored her brother to the throne.

Really? I wonder where the NYT got access to this “internal secret history”.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Clippings, History, Obits, TMQ watch, TV | Comments Closed

Your Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow update.

January 7th, 2016

It took us a non-trivial amount of digging to find this, but:

The case against Chow went to the jury on Tuesday.

We will keep an eye out for the verdict, or lack of one.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law, Leland "Uncle" Yee | Comments Closed

Firings and obits: January 7, 2016.

January 7th, 2016

Lovie Smith out as coach of hapless the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. 8-24 in two seasons.

Smith is the third Bucs head coach to be dismissed since the firing of Jon Gruden at the end of the 2008 season, making Tampa Bay’s next coach the team’s fifth in nine seasons.

Your Pierre Boulez obit. An appreciation.

Posted in Clippings, Firings, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

TMQ Watch: January 5, 2016.

January 6th, 2016

Happy 2016. After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Guns, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | 1 Comment »

More blood, more water.

January 4th, 2016

Tom Coughlin out as head coach of the New York Football Giants. ESPN. It seems that this is being spun as a resignation, though I suspect it was more “mutual agreement”.

The Tennessee Titans are “not renewing the contract” of general manager Ruston Webster. You may recall that they fired head coach Ken Whisenhunt in November.

The Chargers have fired offensive coordinator Frank Reich, but apparently plan to keep Mike McCoy as head coach.

Posted in Clippings, Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 4, 2016.

January 4th, 2016

Bad time for cinematographers.

Both the LAT and the A/V Club are reporting the passing of noted cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.

He won an Oscar for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, and worked on a whole boatload of other stuff: “Deliverance”, “The Deer Hunter”, “The Long Goodbye”, “Sugarland Express”…

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Blood in the water.

January 4th, 2016

In the immortal words of Snoop, “Damn… you ain’t even wait to get the (expletive deleted) in the house!”

Jim Tomsula out after one season (5-11) with the San Francisco 49ers.

Head coach Mike Pettine and general manager Ray Farmer out in Cleveland.

“…I still think this is a very attractive job and I’m very excited to go out and find the right person to do it.”

Haslam, who’s now fired three coaches since he took over in 2012, stressed that the club will look for leaders who are willing to collaborate — something that seemed to be a problem in the Pettine-Farmer era. Both were the seventh men in their roles since 1999.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

The ex-presidents are Pez dispensers!

January 2nd, 2016

Found at Blood Bath and Beyond, and also available from Amazon: Presidents of The United States Volume 8 – Pez Limited Edition Collectible Gift Set.

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A better view with some of the packaging removed:

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Seriously. How did I live this long without a Richard Nixon Pez dispenser?

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All I need now is Lyndon Johnson (who is in Volume 7) and I can do my own remake of Point Break.

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(Well, okay, technically, I guess I would also need a Gary Busey Pez dispenser and maybe a Keanu Reeves one, too.)

(“The part of Keanu Reeves is being played by a tongue depressor.”)

(And I should probably get Volume 3 as well, because who doesn’t need Millard Fillmore to go with their Richard Nixon?)

Posted in Geek, Nixon, Photography | Comments Closed

You know what the problem with fiction is?

January 2nd, 2016

A few nights ago, I had an excellent dinner with a bunch of my friends.

Recent events resulted in the dinner conversation going off on a tangent about Quaaludes and “roofies”, which prompted me to look up Wikipedia’s entry on Quaaludes.

…the massive cache of powder and tabletted methaqualone produced under the aegis of the apartheid-era South African government’s Project Coast in a segment thereof directed by Dr Wouter Basson (whose “Brownies” are capsules of pure MDMA in doses of up to 135 mg), who at one point was held by police in Croatia carrying $40m in Vatican bearer bonds when attempting to purchase 500 kilos of methaqualone.

I wasn’t even aware there was such a thing as “Vatican bearer bonds”.

Dr. Wouter Basson is a cardiologist who somehow managed to become head of the South African government’s chemical and biological warfare projects (the “Project Coast” mentioned above).

The entire drug cache disappeared into the underground in the final days of the National Party’s tenure in office. The total methaqualone cache may have approached a metric ton.

A metric ton of Quaaludes. Jordan Belfort, call your office, please.

Fiction has to be believable. You can’t put something like a government produced cache containing a metric ton of quaaludes, or a guy walking around with $40 million in bearer bonds from the Vatican, into a novel and expect people to believe you.

Posted in Clippings, Geek, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 1, 2016.

January 1st, 2016

Wayne Rogers.

Unfortunately, his death seems to have fallen into the holiday gap, so everyone’s running the same AP obit. The LAT link above seems to be the most complete version.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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