Major League Baseball is at the all-star break, so I probably owe everyone a loser update.
I haven’t really been keeping up this year because there hasn’t been anyone historically bad this year.
The lowest winning percentages in MLB right now are the Los Angeles Angels and the Kansas City Royals, both 38-59 for a .392 winning percentage. After that, the Colorado Rockies come in at 39-59 for .398. The White Sox are actually on top of their division (50-45, .526).
Happy 46th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night! I think I may have used this before, but it has been a minute I believe:
Obit watch: Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina). NYT. WP (archived). Lawrence.
You know, for a movie that is often called one of the worst movies to win the Academy Award for Best Picture1…”The Greatest Show On Earth” is actually pretty swell. Is it better than “High Noon”? I don’t know that you can make a head-to-head comparison, but I thought “Show” was much more fun. And sometimes that’s what you want out of a movie: fun. (And I say this as a person with conflicted views about circuses.)
Which raises the question: if you don’t have animals, clowns, or a ringmaster, are you still Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus? Heck, are you even still a circus at all?
We all know that Jimmy Stewart was one of the greats, but he’s brilliant in this. Especially since he spends the entire film in clown makeup, for reasons.
And how many movies can you think of that have a love…pentagon? Brad is in love with Holly, who loves him. But she takes up with The Great Sebastian, who returns her affections (though, honestly, it seems like The Great Sebastian would return the affections of anything female). He also has a past with Angel, who also falls for Brad, but is claimed by the pathologically jealous elephant trainer Klaus. (I wonder if this is patient zero for the evil elephant trainer in fiction. See also.)
…and three episodes of “Mannix”. (“Deadfall“, parts 1 and 2, season 1, episodes 17 and 18. She was “Gail Mason”. “Shadow of a Man“, season 2, episode 16. She was “Barbara Sanderson”.)
While that may be technically correct, there was certainly a lot of discussion of Roy DeSoto’s home life and Johnny Gage’s dating life. Their personal lives were not complete ciphers.
Other credits include “Walker, Texas Ranger”, “Battlestar Galactica” (1979), and “The Bold Ones: The Senator” (the two-part episode “A Continual Roar of Musketry”: as I’ve noted before, Harlan Ellison praised this episode highly in one of the “Glass Teat” essays).
Peter Van Norden, actor. Other credits include “The New Odd Couple”, “Hardcastle and McCormick”, and “Madman of the People”.
…”Happy 250th birthday, America!” like getting your photo taken with a person in a beaver costume.
(I respect Ben Franklin, but he was wrong about symbols. The bald eagle was absolutely the right choice for the United States. If you had to pick a second choice, the beaver would be the one: industrious, useful, and capable of violence if crossed. The wild turkey is useless, unless it comes out of a bottle.)
Carl Rinsch was sentenced yesterday. He was convicted last year of defrauding Netflix of $11 million for a series he never completed. (Previously. Previously.)
Would I do time, in what will probably be a white-collar resort prison, for $4,400,000 a year? Certainly not, as there are things I value more. But I can see that the tradeoff might work for some folks.
Also: “…$638,000 on two mattresses”. How do you spend $319,000 on a mattress? Not from those Internet mattress people for sure.
“…plus another $295,000 on luxury bedding and linens”. What is this I can’t even.
Dr. Roy G. Jinks passed away last night. I’m sorry that I don’t have anything to link to at the moment.
Dr. Jinks was a driving force in Smith and Wesson collecting. Arguably, he was the driving force. He was one of the founders of the Smith and Wesson Collector’s Association. He was a long time S&W employee, working in multiple positions within the company (including as their official historian for quite a while). He did more to preserve S&W history than any other person. And he wrote the definitive (though about 1980) history of S&W.
This is a great loss. I will perhaps have more to say about this in the coming days. I will say that we were (sort of) friends, in the sense that he could probably have picked me out of a police lineup, and we talked pretty regularly at the Symposiums.
Lawrence gave me copies of a couple of her books one year. I have to say, “steamy” is a pretty accurate description of those books. I also would accept “kinky”.
I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith & Wesson’s seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homeopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult. But I thought it was grand. It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon. It only had one fault—you could not hit anything with it. One of our “conductors” practiced awhile on a cow with it, and as long as she stood still and behaved herself she was safe; but as soon as she went to moving about, and he got to shooting at other things, she came to grief.
–Mark Twain, Roughing It
According to Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate (and a lot of inaccurate) information, the events of Roughing It took place between 1861 and 1867. So it is likely that Twain’s “pitiful little Smith & Wesson’s seven-shooter” was something very much like this:
I’ve been tied up with various things and haven’t been able to book blog as much as I would like. Plus blogging with Bluehost is a constant struggle, and I really need to get on the stick about moving this blog.
But I had a three day weekend, and I had a little time, so I thought I’d blog some things from the backlog. It took a little longer than I expected, for the usual reasons.
This time, though, I’m not doing gun books. Oh, I have plenty of those to blog. But I wanted to do something different. So these are not “gun” books in the sense I would use. A couple of these are peripherally “gun” books, and a couple are completely not “gun” books.
So: weird Australian mammals, a cookbook, a history book, and Roy Chapman Andrews after the jump…
