…at the bottom of the AL Central.
Al Avila out as president and general manager in Detroit.
He’d been with the team for 22 years.
Tigers, Tigers, burning bright…
August 11th, 2022I’ve been in a mood.
August 11th, 2022So here are two swell stories, about things I’m not even particularly a fan of.
1. American Girl dolls.
Anyhow I think I just watched one of the best medical bedside manners and workflows, with clear care given to patient comfort and consent, that I have ever seen, and it was for a doll.
— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) August 10, 2022
2. J-pop.
Edited to add: And from the Department of It Never Fails, shortly after I posted this, something else happened that put me in a better mood. I can’t talk about it now (I hope to be able to in the future), but: go buy stuff from Hornady. Yes, this is an endorsement. No, they haven’t given me anything for this endorsement.
Obit watch: August 11, 2022.
August 11th, 2022Gary C. Schroen, CIA officer.
He was most famous for leading the first team of CIA people – probably the first team of Americans, period – into Afghanistan after 9/11.
Mr. Schroen selected seven men and gathered the weapons, outdoor gear and food they would need. The mission was code-named Jawbreaker. At least one representative from the military was supposed to join them, but the Pentagon pulled out of the mission at the last minute, declaring it too dangerous.
“There was no rescue force,” Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. case officer who worked frequently with Mr. Schroen, said in a phone interview. “If they got in trouble, there were no American troops to come rescue them.”
Before Mr. Schroen left for the mission, Mr. Black took him aside.
“I want to make it clear what your real job is,” Mr. Schroen recalled Mr. Black telling him. “Once the Taliban are broken, your job is to find bin Laden, kill him and bring his head back on dry ice.”
He also wrote a book, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (affiliate link).
Darryl Hunt, bass player for the Pogues. I apologize for not inserting a musical interlude here, but I couldn’t find one that featured Mr. Hunt. If anybody has one, they are more than welcome to put a link in comments.
Obit watch: August 10, 2022.
August 10th, 2022Taiki Yanagida, Japanese jockey. He was trampled during a race a week ago, and had been hospitalized since.
Ryan Fellows. He was on a show called “Street Outlaws”, which airs on Discovery, and seems to involve drag races on closed public roads.
Gene LeBell, noted stuntman. 252 credits in IMDB.
During taping, it was reported that Lee was beating up on the stuntmen, prompting stunt coordinator Bennie Dobbins to bring in LeBell to help set the actor straight by “putting him in a headlock or something.”
In his 2005 autobiography The Godfather of Grappling, LeBell remembered grabbing Lee, who then “started making all those noises that he became famous for … but he didn’t try to counter me, so I think he was more surprised than anything else.”
He then hoisted Lee over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and ran around the set as Lee shouted, “Put me down or I’ll kill you.”
If that rings a bell, yeah, Quentin Tarantino says that Mr. LeBell influenced the Cliff Booth character in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. Apparently in more ways than just the Bruce Lee bit.
Here’s a PDF of a vintage NYT article about the Hall murder, if you want to start down that rabbit hole.
The Audio Files.
August 9th, 2022This is a couple of days old, but I don’t think it has gotten a lot of attention, and it lightly pushes some of my buttons.
There’s a company called Mobile Fidelity, or MoFi. They press records. They also have some recordings available in SACD format, and sell record accessories and electronics. I talked to Mike the Musicologist, and he owns some of their SACD recordings, which I will take as a qualified endorsement.
MoFi’s big deal was that they supposedly used “original master tapes” for their recordings.
Mike Esposito runs a record store in Phoenix, “The ‘In’ Groove”. He put up a video on July 14th claiming that, contrary to their advertising, MoFi “had actually been using digital files in its production chain” for their re-issues. (And apparently it wasn’t just re-issues of material that was originally recorded digitally.)
(Remember the early days of CD audio and the SPARS code? Wasn’t that a time?)
Anyway, a lot of audiophiles attacked Mr. Esposito for posting the video and implying MoFi’s claims were not legit.
MoFi, for their part, invited Mr. Esposito to visit them in California. So he went out there, and sat down with some of MoFi’s engineers…
…
As you know, Bob, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the kind of audiophile who spends $5,000 on a turntable for their 78 RPM records. On the other hand, I also don’t have a lot of sympathy for companies that get people to buy stuff by lying to them. On the gripping hand, who am I to look down on these people, when I spend a fair amount of my disposable income on obscure Smith and Wessons and first editions?
…
Marketing has been a key element of the MoFi model. Most releases include a banner on the album cover proclaiming it the “Original Master Recording.” And every One-Step, which cut out parts of the production process to supposedly get closer to the original tape, includes a thick explainer sheet in which the company outlines in exacting detail how it creates its records. But there has been one very important item missing: any mention of a digital step.
The company has obscured the truth in other ways. MoFi employees have done interviews for years without mentioning digital. In 2020, Grant McLean, a Canadian customer, got into a debate with a friend about MoFi’s sourcing. McLean believed in the company and wrote to confirm that he was right. In a response he provided to The Post, a customer service representative wrote McLean that “there is no analog to digital conversion in our vinyl cutting process.”
…
What else is there to say? Other than, if you can’t tell the difference, is there a difference?
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#96 in a series)
August 9th, 2022This is a bit of a change-up pitch.
RBB is a German public broadcaster. More specifically:
Patricia Schlesinger was the director of RBB. She resigned on Sunday, as did Wolf-Dieter Wolf, chairman of the board.
…
Wolf-Dieter Wolf has been “linked with some of the accusations leveled at Schlesinger”, whatever that means.
Obit watch: August 9, 2022.
August 9th, 2022I’m thinking about no longer posting obits.
Recently, it seems like as soon as I post one obit watch, two or three or more people die. Clearly, correlation implies causality: my posting obits is making people die, therefore, if I stop posting, people will stop passing away. Right?
Well, it’s a theory, anyway.
David McCullough, historian and author. It is an odd thing: I enjoy history, but I mostly haven’t read any of McCullough’s work, and I don’t know why. (I say “mostly” because we did have some of those Reader’s Digest Condensed Books volumes around the house when I was very young, and one of them had The Johnstown Flood in it. I remember being fascinated, but more for the account of the actual flood itself than the human and engineering factors leading up to it. I should probably grab a copy of the real book somewhere and read it.)
In 1970, she was asked to join a crudely manufactured group named Toomorrow, formed by the American producer Don Kirshner in an attempt to repeat his earlier success with the Monkees. Following his grand design, the group starred in a science-fiction film written for them and recorded its soundtrack. Both projects tanked.
“It was terrible, and I was terrible in it,” she later told The New York Times.
The name of the film is also “Toomorrow“, as best as I can tell. There’s a PAL DVD listed on Amazon as “currently unavailable”, but you can get the soundtrack on vinyl.
Lawrence emailed the obit for Lamont Dozier.
…
Sometimes he would have an idea for a song’s feel: He wrote the Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There” thinking about Bob Dylan’s phrasing on “Like a Rolling Stone.” Sometimes he concocted an attention-grabbing gimmick, like the staccato guitars at the beginning of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” that evoked a radio news bulletin.
And sometimes Mr. Dozier uttered a real-life sentence that worked in song, as he did one night when he was in a Detroit motel with a girlfriend and a different girlfriend started pounding on the door. He pleaded with the interloper, “Stop, in the name of love” — and then realized the potency of what he had said. The Holland-Dozier-Holland team quickly hammered the sentence into a three-minute single, the Supremes’ “Stop! In the Name of Love.”
Short observation on film.
August 8th, 2022The Saturday Night Movie Group watched “The Last Emperor” over the weekend.
“The Last Emperor” is a beautiful looking movie. Wikipedia claims the budget was $23.8 million in 1987 dollars and every penny of that shows on the screen. Of course, the production had a lot of help from the Communist Chinese government, so I’m sure they were able to stretch their budget quite a bit…
(IMDB says £23,000,000. I’m not sure what the conversion factor between 1987 pounds and US dollars is.)
Here’s my quick point: $23.8 million in 1987 dollars translates to $62,079,241.20 in 2022 dollars.
The “unspekable” “Batgirl” movie that is allegedly so bad Warner Brothers won’t release it cost $90 to $100 million (sources vary).
I guess talent will out. Helped, of course, by the Commies.
Obit watch: August 8, 2022.
August 8th, 2022Clu Gulager, long time character actor. THR.
165 acting credits in IMDB. Man was in everything, from “The Virginian” to “The F.B.I” to “The Last Picture Show” to “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood”, with lots of stops along the way…
…including “Mannix”. (“The Man Who Wasn’t There”, season 6, episode 16.)
Roger E. Mosley. Credits beyond “Magnum, P.I.” include “The Rockford Files”, “McCloud”, “McQ” (which Clu Gulager was also in), “The Mack”, and “The Sixth Sense” (the 1972 TV series).
As Mosley remembered it, his agent told him: ” ‘It’s starring this guy Tom Selleck. Tom Selleck has made about five pilot shows … and none of them has sold. So here’s what you do, Roger: Sign up for the show, go over to Hawaii, they’ll treat you good for the 20 days it will take to shoot the [pilot], you’ll get a lot of money, and then you come home. A show with Tom Selleck always fails, and you’ll be fine.’
“Well, 8 1/2 years later … “
Mosley in real life was a licensed private helicopter pilot (something the producers discovered after he was hired, he said) but not allowed to fly on the series.
Obit watch: August 6, 2022.
August 6th, 2022Today’s kind of a run-down of people who aren’t as famous as I usually cover, but whose obits I find interesting in one way or another.
Dee Hock. He’s generally credited with having built the consortium that became Visa into what it is today.
Melissa Bank. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing was a big deal (I never read it). Her follow-up book seems to have been well regarded, but didn’t do as well, and she was working on a third book when she died at 61.
Mary Ellin Barrett. She was one of Irving Berlin’s daughters, and wrote a book about her father (Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir).
In it, Ms. Barrett offered a new portrait of her father: droll, self-effacing, with an unspoken perfectionism that would doom him to bitterness in old age but that for four decades of maturity pushed him to dazzling artistic achievements, along with attentiveness to his family.
That has become a definitive insider’s view of Irving Berlin. The Times critic Stephen Holden credited Ms. Barrett with the ability to balance affection for her father with awareness of his flaws, and he called her book a “touching, wise, gracefully written memoir.”
Albert Woodfox, who spent 42 years in solitary at Angola.
Mr. Woodfox was placed in solitary confinement in 1972 after being accused of murdering Brent Miller, a 23-year-old corrections officer. A tangled legal ordeal ensued, including two convictions, both overturned, and three indictments stretching over four decades.
The case struck most commentators as problematic. No forensic evidence linked Mr. Woodfox to the crime, so the authorities’ argument depended on witnesses, who over time were discredited or proved unreliable.
Sid Jacobson, comics writer.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#94 and #95 in a series)
August 4th, 2022Wanda Vázquez, the former governor of Puerto Rico, has been charged with taking bribes from a donor to her campaign.
The donor, Julio M. Herrera Velutini — a Venezuelan banker who has been mired in regulatory problems in Puerto Rico — was also charged. Mr. Herrera, 50, owns Bancrédito, an international bank that faced scrutiny from Puerto Rico regulators over suspicious banking transactions.
According to the Department of Justice, Mr. Herrera wanted the island’s top banking regulator to be replaced, and in return offered to pay $300,000 to political consultants working on the governor’s campaign. Ms. Vázquez, who was facing re-election at the time, agreed to the plan, W. Stephen Muldrow, the United States Attorney for Puerto Rico, said, adding that Mr. Herrera then formed a political action committee for Ms. Vázquez.
The grand jury’s 42-page indictment details meetings and text messages purported to show the quid-pro-quo nature of the arrangement. The governor went through with her end of the bargain, forcing the incumbent banking commissioner to step down and installing Mr. Herrera’s choice as the new commissioner, according to the indictment.
It gets a little better: the bribe money was funneled through an ex-FBI agent.
Ms. Vázquez became governor in 2019, after the previous governor resigned. She lost the primary election in 2020. The NYT describes her as a pro-statehood Republican.
In other news, Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren got booted out of office. No, he didn’t lose an election. No, he hasn’t been indicted.
Ron DeSantis fired his arse for not enforcing state law.
…
But:
…Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said at Thursday’s news conference that police have had long-running frustrations with Warren for not prosecuting particular cases.
“I continue to work with my law enforcement counterparts who privately are frustrated with the state attorney, who seems intently focused on empathy for criminals and less interested in pursuing justice for crime victims,” Chronister said.
In addition to the abortion and transgender stuff, the complaints include:
▪ Warren enacting a policy not to prosecute “certain criminal violations, including trespassing at a business location, disorderly conduct, disorderly intoxication, and prostitution.”
▪ Warren enacting a policy “against prosecuting crimes where the initial encounter between law enforcement and the defendant results from a non-criminal violation in connection with riding a bicycle or a pedestrian violation.”
Bonus: Scott Israel is apparently working as a chief of police in Opa-locka, Florida. That’s Scott Israel, former Broward County Sheriff, who got booted from office by Ron DeSantis after the Parkland shooting. Did not know this.
Obit watch: August 4, 2022.
August 4th, 2022Private First Class Robert E. Simanek (USMC – ret.). Alt link.
Private Simanek received the Medal of Honor for actions during the Korean War. From his Medal of Honor citation:
I kind of liked this quote:
He was 92. His death (according to the NYT) leaves two surviving MoH recipients from the Korean War: Hiroshi Miyamura, who is 96, and Ralph Puckett Jr., who is 95.
Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Indiana) was killed in a car accident yesterday. Two of her aides, district director Zachery Potts and communications director Emma Thomson, were also killed.
Lawrence sent over an obit for British actor John Steiner, who died in a car accident on Sunday. Credits include “Caligula”, “Deported Women of the SS Special Section”, and “The .44 Specialist”.
Richard Tait, co-inventor of “Cranium”. He was 58, and died of COVID complications.
Dallas Edeburn, deputy with the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office in Minnesota. He was found dead in his car after his shift. In March of 2021, he was in a serious accident when his patrol car was hit by a stolen car fleeing from the police. Other officers pulled him from his burning car, and he sustained pretty serious injuries. It isn’t clear if his death is related to the previous incident.
Johnny Famechon, former featherweight champion of the world.
Obit watch: August 3, 2022.
August 3rd, 2022Vin Scully. LAT through archive.is.
…
…
Fans came to trust him when the team struggled and he wasn’t afraid to say so. After television took over, his broadcasts retained a familiar tenor; belonging to a generation before instant replay, he still used his words to paint a picture. Every game included shots of children in the stands. Every at-bat, it seems, prompted a quip.
Talking about an opposing player, Scully once said: “Andre Dawson has a bruised knee and is listed as day-to-day. … Aren’t we all?”
…
Home life was devoted to children and grandchildren and a reading list that included James Michener as well as books about famous court trials.
“I’m certainly not an intellectual,” he said. “I just have a fairly curious mind.”
Mo Ostin, music executive.
“Batgirl”, the movie. I’m seeing estimates that this cost between $90 and $100 million, so it’d have to pull in about $300 million to break even. Does Warner Brothers have no confidence that they can make at least $300 million? Doesn’t any superhero movie these days pull in about $300 million in the first week?
Or is this part of WB’s Machiavellian plan? Announce that they consider the movie to be un-releasable, wait for the Internet clamor to see the movie (insert accusations of sexism and racism), then reverse their decision, release the movie, and hope that public attention gets them to at least break-even? (See “Snyder Cut“.)
Obit watch: August 1, 2022.
August 1st, 2022It never fails. I posted an obit watch yesterday, and as soon as I did, it got hectic.
Samuel Sandoval has passed away at the age of 98. Mr. Sandoval served his country with honor during WWII as one of the Navajo code talkers.
Nichelle Nichols. THR. Tributes.
I’m sorry if it seems like I’m giving her death short shrift, but her passing has received an enormous amount of attention, and anything I could add at this point would be superfluous.
Russell was the ultimate winner. He led the University of San Francisco to N.C.A.A. tournament championships in 1955 and 1956. He won a gold medal with the United States Olympic basketball team in 1956. He led the Celtics to eight consecutive N.B.A. titles from 1959 to 1966, far eclipsing the Yankees’ five straight World Series victories (1949 to 1953) and the Montreal Canadiens’ five consecutive Stanley Cup championships (1956 to 1960).
He was the N.B.A.’s most valuable player five times and an All-Star 12 times.
A reedy, towering figure at 6 feet 10 inches and 220 pounds, Russell was cagey under the basket, able to anticipate an opponent’s shots and gain position for a rebound. And if the ball caromed off the hoop, his tremendous leaping ability almost guaranteed that he’d grab it. He finished his career as the No. 2 rebounder in N.B.A. history, behind his longtime rival Wilt Chamberlain, who had three inches on him.
Russell pulled down 21,620 rebounds, an astonishing average of 22.5 per game, with a single-game high of 51 against the Syracuse Nationals (the forerunners of the Philadelphia 76ers) in 1960.
He didn’t have much of a shooting touch, but he scored 14,522 points — many on high-percentage, short left-handed hook shots — for an average of 15.1 per game. His blocked shots — the total is unrecorded, because such records were not kept in his era — altered games.
Pat Carroll. THR. Other credits include “She’s the Sheriff”, “Too Close For Comfort”, and “ER”.
John Aielli, longtime local public radio host.
Paul Coker Jr. Interesting guy: he was one of the old-time “Mad Magazine” staff (aka the “Usual Gang Of Idiots”). He was also a production designer for Rankin/Bass.
Hattip to Lawrence on this one, and for reminding me to order the Rifftrax of “Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey” for Christmas viewing this year.
Obit watch: July 31, 2022.
July 31st, 2022Burt Metcalfe. In addition to his producing credits on “M*A*S*H”, he did some acting. Credits include “The Twilight Zone” (“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”), “Perry Mason”, “The Bridges at Toko-Ri”, “The Outer Limits”, and the “12 O’Clock High” series. Producing credits also include “AfterMASH”.
Stuart Woods, another one of those big-shot thriller authors.
…
He later moved to Ireland, where he began to write his first novel. But he was soon diverted when he became enamored with sailing and began racing. In 1976, in a race from Plymouth, England, to Newport, R.I., that took him 45 days, he finished about in the middle of the field.
He then wrote a nonfiction account of the race, “Blue Water, Green Skipper,” and, after returning to Georgia, sold the American rights to W.W. Norton & Company. It also agreed to publish “Chiefs,” the thriller that Mr. Woods had begun eight years earlier.
He was another one of those guys whose books I saw all the time on the rack at the grocery store, but I’ve never actually read any of them. Chiefs sounds like it might be a good place to start…
Mary Alice, actress. She won a Tony for “Fences”, an Emmy for ““I’ll Fly Away”, and appeared in “The Matrix Revolutions” among other credits.