Update.

September 29th, 2025

I know I said on Friday I’d try to address the Yogurt Shop Murders after today’s press conference.

I didn’t get a chance to watch the press conference today due to continuous meetings. I’m sure there’s a recording somewhere that I will try to watch.

My other issue is that yesterday was a rough day for me, and I haven’t had time to do much with the murder story because I’m trying to clean up from that.

I drove down to Kyle yesterday since it was a kind of off day for my regular church, and I thought I’d visit a friend at her church.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to connect with her, but that was okay. That also wasn’t the issue.

On my way back from Kyle, one of my car tires catastrophically failed on the Southwest Parkway.

Then I had an appointment at 4 PM at the Apple Store in Barton Creek Mall to get my iPhone battery replaced. I made the appointment and waited around for about 90 minutes while they replaced the battery. Everyone was very nice (the Apple employee who checked me in was especially awesome), and I got my phone, got in my car, started driving out of the parking lot, decided to call home and see if I needed to pick up food…

…and nobody could hear me. I checked with a couple of other people, and it wasn’t just one phone. It seems that, when they replaced the battery, Apple broke the microphone on my phone, so I can’t make calls. (Well, technically, I can make calls: I just can’t talk to anybody.)

So now I need to get in touch with Apple and figure out the next steps to get the microphone fixed. This is complicated by the fact that I have 2FA software on my phone that I need for work, so I can’t be without it for more than a few hours.

I just bought a new Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio with some of my bonus money, and enabled cell service on it. I’ve tested, and in a pinch, I can use that to make voice calls. But it isn’t an ideal solution.

I did manage to get an appointment today with Discount Tire to get my tire replaced. They were efficient and nice…

…and it turns out they don’t have the Michelin tires I want. They thought they had one in stock, and told me I could come back in a day or two for the second one. Then it turned out they couldn’t find the one, either.

So they slapped a loaner tire on my car, and I get to come back in a few days to get the two tires done.

There were, however, two redeeming points. The tire that failed was under warranty, so they’re replacing it for free. They suggested I might want to get a second tire done, since it had more wear on it than the other three. I kind of resisted that at first. But then I asked about doing something to replace the doughnut spare on the car, which I’ve put some wear on and no longer trust.

Discount offered me a spare full-size wheel at a reasonable price, and offered to take the more worn – but still good – tire off, replace it with a new tire, and mount the old tire on the new wheel. Thus giving me a non-doughnut spare, which I think is swell, as I hate driving on those.

But I still have to go back to Discount once they get everything together, which is more time out of my schedule. Good thing this isn’t one of my busy weeks.

I’ll try to have some commentary up about the murders in the next few days. In the meantime, “New DNA technology key to solving 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders” from KXAN. It looks like the new technique is Y-STR DNA testing. As I’ve said before, I wish I knew more about DNA testing than I do, and I can’t really comment on the soundness of the methodology. The article also states that there is ballistic evidence which ties these murders to a case in Kentucky and several other crimes.

The connection of the suspect to Texas remains unclear to me. And I hate to be cynical, because the reports are making this sound like good police work.

However, if this turns out wrong, it wouldn’t be the first time. Four other men were convicted in 1999, but were cleared in 2009 after Y-STR profiling excluded them. It could be that they have the right guy this time. It could be that they’re clearing a cold case by playing “pin the tail on the dead guy”. At the moment, I’m leaning more in the direction of this being the right guy, but I can understand the cynicism some people in my circle have expressed.

(Previously on WCD.)

Posted in Apple, Austin, Cops, Law | 3 Comments »

Firings watch.

September 29th, 2025

The MLB regular season is over. Time for the baseball version of “Bloody Monday”.

Rocco Baldelli out as manager of the Minnesota Twins. 70-92 this season.

Baldelli finished his seven-season tenure with a 527-505 record (.511 win percentage). The only Twins managers with more victories are Tom Kelly (1,140-1,244) and Ron Gardenhire (1,068-1,039).

ESPN.

Bob Melvin out as manager of the San Francisco Giants.

Under Melvin, the Giants went 80-82 last year and 81-81 this season, which wa president of baseball operations Buster Posey’s first in his new position.

…

In 22 seasons, Melvin has a 1,678-1,588 record with the Mariners, Diamondbacks, A’s, Padres and Giants.

He was 161-163 in two seasons with San Francisco.

ESPN.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Miscellany.

September 29th, 2025

Another quote for your pleasure:

Remember when you see one of those kitchy “What Would Jesus Do” thingies — beating people with whips, suplexing them into the street, and fast-pitching tables and chairs at them is an option. Just saying.

I don’t have room for this elsewhere, so: my thanks to SP RN and Bones. I finished Metzger’s Dog over the weekend, and their recommendations were right on target.

Posted in Bagatelle, Books, Religion | Comments Closed

Your loser update: September 29, 2025.

September 29th, 2025

The NFL portion of the loser update has to wait until tomorrow. The 0-3 Jets play the 0-3 Dolphins tonight. I’m sure this will be an exciting game, if you’re a big fan of fiascos.

The major league baseball regular season ended yesterday, though.

It delights me to be able to report that Cleveland clinched their division (AL Central) and Detroit clinched a playoff berth (also in the AL Central). I will be happy if either team goes to the big show.

But I know that’s not what you are wondering about.

The White Sox finshed 60-102, for a .370 winning percentage. That’s bad, but it doesn’t even make Wikipedia’s list for the modern era.

And the Rockies? Well, I was half right. They did get swept by Seattle (who won their division: the AL West).

But they also got swept by San Francisco. I had figured they’d win one game in SF, but they managed to put together a six game losing streak.

Their final record? 43-119, for a .265 winning percentage. So, so close to a record.

As it is, they are fourth on the Wikipedia list for losses (tied with the 2003 Tigers, and ahead of the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics). If you sort by winning percentage, they come in eighth, tied again with the 2003 Tigers and just ahead of the 1952 Pittsburgh Pirates. (For the record, the 2024 White Sox were .253, for fifth place on the list. The modern era record for worst winning percentage is still the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics, at .235 over 153 games.)

Posted in Loser, Sports | 3 Comments »

Quotes.

September 27th, 2025

A few quotes I’ve run across recently that amused me:

…“Michael, anybody that eats chocolate cake alone is an a–hole.”

“You ain’t gotta get real technical to dish out death sometimes.”

By way of Mike the Musicologist. He didn’t provide me with a link, but the context is a woman commenting on how hard it is to carry concealed while wearing a dress:

“I have to show someone my panties before I shoot them.”

Edited to add: Link added.

Posted in Bagatelle, Guns | Comments Closed

Crime watch.

September 26th, 2025

I’m going to make this short, because it broke at the end of the day today and there’s more to come.

The Austin Police Department says that they have identified a suspect as the Yogurt Shop Killer.

Police identified the suspect through DNA and ballistics testing.

…

On Dec. 6, 1991, Austin firefighters responded to a fire at the yogurt shop. The structure call would sadly reveal the quadruple homicide case, when the bodies of four teenage girls were found.

APD says they plan to hold a press conference on Monday to provide more information, so I’ll probably wait until Monday night to do a longer write-up. But I wanted to get at least this out now.

The identified suspect killed himself in 1999.

Posted in Austin, Cops, Law | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 25, 2025.

September 25th, 2025

Sara Jane Moore. She was 95, which surprised me: I had been under the impression she was much younger.

You remember Ms. Moore, don’t you?

In San Francisco, about 3,000 people were gathered near Union Square for a glimpse of the president [Gerald Ford – DB] as he left the St. Francis Hotel. Ms. Moore, 45, who had been questioned by Secret Service agents the day before but then released, was standing across the street, 40 to 50 feet away from the commander in chief. She drew a chrome-plated .38-caliber revolver and fired at the president. The shot missed, and she raised the gun for a second shot.
Oliver W. Sipple, a former Marine, deflected the gun just as she fired. The bullet narrowly missed the president, ricocheted off a wall and grazed a bystander. Pandemonium erupted as Mr. Ford, unhurt, was hustled into a limousine by Secret Service agents and sped away. Mr. Sipple and two police officers seized Ms. Moore.

The attempt took place on September 22, 1975. Ms. Moore died on September 24th, 2025, so almost exactly 50 years later.

In February 1979, Ms. Moore and another female inmate escaped from a minimal-security federal prison camp in West Virginia by scaling a 12-foot fence, but they were recaptured hours later. During her imprisonment, she converted from Christianity to Judaism in 1986, explaining to Ms. Spieler that she wanted kosher food for better-quality prison meals. She was paroled from a federal prison in Dublin, Calif., on Dec. 31, 2007, a year after Mr. Ford died at 93.
Ms. Moore moved under an assumed name to an unidentified town on the East Coast and only rarely gave interviews. But she did speak to Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” show in 2009.
“It was a time people don’t remember,” Ms. Moore told Mr. Lauer, citing the Vietnam War, a politically divided nation, her own radical beliefs and her attempt to kill the president. “We were saying the country needed to change. The only way it was going to change was a violent revolution. I genuinely thought that this might trigger that new revolution in this country.”

Some things never change.

This is for Mike the Musicologist:

Joining John Wilkes Booth and other notorious figures from history, Ms. Moore was a character in Stephen Sondheim and John Wideman’s dark musical “Assassins,” which debuted Off Broadway in 1990. In the show, she was portrayed as a hapless revolutionary — “a true flibbertigibbet,” as the critic David Richards wrote in The New York Times, “as likely to pull a banana from her capacious handbag as she is a pistol.”

…

Accounts of her life are fragmentary and contradictory, partly because she deliberately obscured her identity and background. She told people falsely that she was the daughter of a rich coal and timber family, had graduate degrees in business administration and was an aspiring actress. Officials said she had been hospitalized repeatedly for aberrant behavior. At some point she took her mother’s maiden name as her surname.

Just in case you were wondering, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme is still alive. She’s only 76.

Henry Jaglom, indie director. I’d heard of him, but have never seen one of his movies.

He acknowledged that his movies tended to be either loved or hated. Many critics found his work rambling and navel-gazing. As the British newspaper The Guardian noted in 1991, his films have been described as “cinema as personal therapy,” “psychobabble” and “diaries as art.”
“It’s fortunate I’m so arrogant,” Mr. Jaglom told The Guardian. “I don’t mind bad reviews. I used to send the worst ones to people as Christmas presents.”

Posted in History, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 24, 2025.

September 24th, 2025

Claudia Cardinale. NYT (archived). IMDB.

The only Claudia Cardinale movie I’ve seen is “Lost Command” (though both “8 1/2” and “Fitzcarraldo” are on our list: “Son of the Pink Panther” is not). She was on a lot of lists of “the most beautiful women in the world”.

Bernie Parent, goalie.

Parent was beloved in Philadelphia — a French Canadian known for his upbeat personality, broad smile, thick mustache and the white fiberglass mask he wore to protect his face. A bumper sticker seen on fenders around Philadelphia paid tribute to his goaltending skills: “Only the Lord saves more than Bernie Parent.”

…

Parent was unprepared for life after hockey. He fell into a depression. He drank too much and got help through Alcoholics Anonymous to become sober. He coached another Flyers goalie, Pelle Lindbergh, who won the Vezina Trophy in 1985. (Later that year, Lindbergh, 26, died of injuries from a car accident.)
“When death defeats greatness, we all mourn,” Parent said at a memorial service for Lindbergh at the Spectrum, the Flyers’ home arena at the time. “And when death defeats youth, we mourn even more.”
Parent worked for many years as a team ambassador for the Flyers, as a spokesman for an insurance company and as a motivational speaker. He also helped other recovering alcoholics.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports | 2 Comments »

I’m Gundy, damn it!

September 23rd, 2025

I guess this counts as a “big” firing, or at least a larger one:

Mike Gundy out at Oklahoma State.

Gundy, 58, is the winningest coach in program history with a record of 170-90 over his 20-plus seasons, accounting for 26.6% of the school’s all-time victories.
No single figure has had as much direct impact over such a significant amount of time as Gundy, who has spent 35 of the past 40 seasons at Oklahoma State in some form.

But this is kind of a “what have you done for me lately” thing. Especially if you define “lately” as “since 2021”.

The 2021 squad came inches short of defeating Baylor and potentially earning a College Football Playoff bid…
But since that moment, OSU has gone 21-21, despite a 10-4 season in 2023 that included another appearance in the Big 12 title game.
The 2024 team went 0-9 in conference play, and the 1-2 start with a 66-point loss to Oregon and a 19-12 loss to Tulsa spelled the end for Gundy, concluding his career with a record of 170-90 (.654 winning percentage), and 12-6 in bowl games.

Noted:

Screenshot

Not quite the war font, but fairly close.

Edited to add: ESPN, for those who want supplemental coverage.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

September 23rd, 2025

I figure that there’s going to be some kind of big firing this week. So far, I haven’t seen any, but there’s been a few small firings.

Sandy Brondello out as coach of the New York Liberty, although this is being presented as non-renewal of her contract. The Liberty won the WNBA championship last year, but were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs this year.

Ms. Brondello was 107-53 in four seasons.

Ike Hilliard out as wide receivers coach for the Atlanta Falcons.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | 2 Comments »

Car bomb explodes in Beirut.

September 22nd, 2025

Lawrence and I have a running joke about overused headlines:

“Car Bomb Explodes In Beirut”.
“Rosie O’Donnell Goes On Unhinged Rant”

And, to that list, we can add:

“The Broadway Musical Is in Trouble”.

None of the 18 commercial musicals that opened on Broadway last season have made a profit yet. Some still could, but several have been spectacular flameouts. The new musicals “Tammy Faye,” “Boop!” and “Smash” each cost at least $20 million to bring to the stage, and each was gone less than four months after opening. All three lost their entire investments.
Lavish revivals of much-loved classics are also fizzling. On Sunday, a revival of “Cabaret,” budgeted for up to $26 million and featuring a costly conversion of a Broadway theater into a nightclub-like setting, threw in the towel at a total loss. A $19.5 million revival of “Gypsy” that starred Audra McDonald and earned strong reviews closed last month without recouping its investment. Even a buzzy production of “Sunset Boulevard,” which won this year’s Tony for best musical revival, failed to make back the $15 million it cost to mount.

…

Only three new musicals have recouped their investments since the pandemic. Two are jukebox musicals: “MJ,” which features the music of Michael Jackson, and “& Juliet,” which features the songs of the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin. The third, “Six,” reimagines the ill-fated wives of King Henry VIII as pop stars.

So “Suffs” didn’t make money? Interesting to know.

But wait!

All three got assistance from the government. “Six” and “MJ” each got $10 million from the federal government in the form of Shuttered Venue Operator Grants, designed to help the arts recover from the shutdown. And “& Juliet” benefited from a $3 million tax credit through a New York State postpandemic program. The federal program ended, and the state program, which has aided almost every Broadway show to open over the last few years, will end this fall unless it is renewed.

Why was this money not going to the Montana State University Angling Oral History Project? Or the USCSB?

Producers and general managers say that every element of making musicals has gotten more expensive in recent years: labor (paying actors and musicians and stage hands as well as the creative teams), material (the lumber and steel, as well as the technology, that go into sets), rent (to theater owners) and fees (to all kinds of vendors who work on shows).

…

A decade ago, the big musical comedy “Something Rotten,” with a cast of 25, cost $14 million to capitalize; last season’s “Death Becomes Her,” another big musical comedy with a cast of 20, cost up to $31.5 million. The high capitalization costs, combined with high running costs, means shows have to run much longer to become profitable.

…

One Broadway investor, James L. Walker Jr. of Atlanta, is so frustrated by the current economics that he’s litigating. After putting $50,000 into the “Cabaret” revival, he filed suit against the producers, alleging fraud. In an interview, Walker pointed out that the show has grossed nearly $90 million in ticket sales, plus whatever it made in sales of liquor, food and merchandise, and that he can’t accept that the investors who raised up to $26 million to finance the show have gotten nothing back. “How is that a good business model?” he asked.

I wish him all the luck in the world, but this sounds like “Hollywood accounting”, and I don’t think any of the suits around that have had much success.

The two this fall include “The Queen of Versailles,” based on a documentary and starring Kristin Chenoweth, and “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York),” a British rom-com with just two actors. Next spring’s slate has not yet taken shape, but among the new musicals circling are stage adaptations of the films “The Lost Boys” and Prince’s “Purple Rain,” of the book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” and of the streaming series “Schmigadoon!,” as well as an original title, “Wanted.”

“Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”, the musical? Maybe the problem is that Broadway is out of ideas.

And haven’t people been saying “The Broadway Musical Is in Trouble” since…1942?

Posted in Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 22, 2025.

September 22nd, 2025

Playing catch-up from the last few days:

Marilyn Hagerty. If you’ve been around the Internet for a while, that name may ring a bell with you.

Ms. Hagerty wrote a restaurant review column (“The Eatbeat”) for the Grand Forks (North Dakota) Herald. In 2012, she wrote a review of the new (and first) Olive Garden in Grand Forks. It went viral on the Internet.

When the article first began to ricochet across social media, the initial consensus was that the writer was a kindly Midwestern grandmother who had lost the script. This seemed to be the view of an out-of-town reader who sent her a one-word email: “Pathetic.”
In fact, Ms. Hagerty was following a script of her own. It was her long-running custom to provide factual rundowns of the dining options in Grand Forks, a college town near the Minnesota border that has fewer than 60,000 people and few restaurants intent on culinary innovation.
She covered truck stops, diners and fast-food joints, some of them more than once. Although she wrote about places serving Vietnamese and Somali cuisine in Grand Forks, Eatbeat readers craving a new thrill generally had to look for it in Fargo, about 80 miles to the south.
“If you were going to review the fine dining here, you’d be done in three weeks,” Ms. Hagerty once said of her community.

What she said. It bothered me at the time, and it still bothers me. Why not seriously engage with and critique with what Olive Garden has to offer? (Back when we were still doing regular reviews, the Saturday Dining Conspiracy also reviewed our local Olive Garden, and our logic was the same: why should they be above criticism?)

Reaction to the review shifted as it became clear that Ms. Hagerty didn’t give a flying breadstick what the cynics thought. Within days, she was in New York, being welcomed by the national media. She gave interviews to “CBS Sunday Morning,” NBC’s “Today” morning program and Anderson Cooper’s syndicated talk show.

…

“My son is full of prunes,” she said.

She was 99.

Jim Edgar, Republican governor of Illinois during the 1990s.

Marian Burros, noted food writer. She worked at various times for the Washington Post, Washington Star, and the NYT.

She might offer a recipe for, say, Martha Washington’s Great Cake, usually in the weekly De Gustibus column, which she took over in 1983, while reporting on a sodium labeling bill being debated in Congress or regulatory battles over the wording of federal dietary guidelines.
From her home base in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, she became a close observer of the White House kitchen, reporting on a succession of presidential chefs, inaugural meals and the dining styles of new administrations. She took a particular interest in the White House vegetable garden planted by Michelle Obama.
On the pleasure side of the equation, her plum torte was one of the most popular recipes in the history of The Times, reprinted every September from 1983 to 1989.

“The Story Behind Our Most Requested Recipe Ever” (archived). Recipe (archived).

Martha Washington’s Great Cake (archived).

Ms. Burros alerted readers of The Post to the potential dangers of food dyes derived from coal tar, notably Red Dye No. 2, which the Food and Drug Administration banned in 1976. And, in a widely reprinted article, she revealed that Fresh Horizons Bread, marketed as a low-calorie alternative to regular bread, contained large amounts of powdered cellulose.

Posted in Food, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

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