Obit watch: July 14, 2025.

July 14th, 2025

Martin Cruz Smith passed away over the weekend. The Rap Sheet has a short item, but I haven’t seen any other coverage.

I find the Arkady Renko books fascinating in the abstract, but I’ve never actually gotten around to reading any of them. (I did, however, see the film version of “Gorky Park”, but I don’t find it really memorable.) I guess he’s another one of those series authors where, now that there’s a defined end to the series, I can start reading…

Samuel Abt, writer for the NYT and The International Herald Tribune. Anong other work, he covered the Tour de France for the papers for close to 30 years.

For his first decade at the paper, Mr. Abt was assigned to cover the Tour; after that, he used his own vacation time and was paid as a freelancer.

I remember reading his coverage, back in the Lance Armstrong days when I followed the Tour.

In an Opinion article in The Times published shortly before Armstrong lost his titles, Mr. Abt expressed sympathy for the cyclist, whom he had known since the early 1990s and with whom he had had a sometimes friendly, sometimes strained relationship.
“The internet and mass media are in a frenzy of condemnation now,” he wrote. “I have not read or heard any sorrow or compassion about a man stripped of his honor.”

Posted in Books, Cycling, Media, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 11, 2025.

July 11th, 2025

Rebekah Del Rio.

I don’t want to seem like I’m speaking ill of Ms. Del Rio: that sequence was one of the few good things in “Mulholland Drive”. Unfortunately, as I’ve said before, much of the rest of the movie was pretentious crap.

Dave “Baby” Cortez. He did an instrumental, “The Happy Organ”, which was a hit in 1959. He also had a hit with “Rinky Dink” in 1962.

Then he became what the paper of record describes as “reclusive”, though it also states that he worked as a church organist, held down other jobs, and even recorded a new album in 2011. The way I read the obit, it seems like he was more “bitter about the music business” than genuinely reclusive.

Then again…

…one of the reasons I wanted to note this obit is that it is one of the NYT‘s odd ones. Mr. Cortez actually passed away in 2022, but his death was not publicly disclosed until recently.

His body lies in Plot 434 on Hart Island, the potter’s field off the coast of the Bronx, where some one million bodies are buried in unmarked graves.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: July 9, 2025.

July 9th, 2025

Dr. Ivar Giaever, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973.

I generally try to note Nobel Prize recipients, especially the physics ones. But Dr. Giaever’s obit stands out to me for two reasons:

It was 1956, and he was applying for a position at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y. The interviewer looked at his grades, from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim, where Dr. Giaever (pronounced JAY-ver) had studied mechanical engineering, and was impressed: The young applicant had scored 4.0 marks in math and physics. The recruiter congratulated him.
But what the recruiter didn’t know was that in Norway, the best grade was a 1.0, not a 4.0, the top grade in American schools. In fact, a 4.0 in Norway was barely passing — something like a D on American report cards. In reality, his academic record in Norway had been anything but impressive.
He did not want to be dishonest, Dr. Giaever would say in recounting the episode with some amusement over the years, but he also did not correct the interviewer. He got the job.

As a reformed “D” student, “D” students for the win, baby!

Dr. Giaever’s work was in quantum tunneling.

One of those weird things is the duality at the heart of quantum physics — namely, how particles, like electrons that orbit the nuclei of atoms, can also behave like waves. Based on this proposition, electrons can, in certain circumstances, “tunnel” through what otherwise is an impermeable barrier. Imagine a tennis ball bouncing off a wall a few times before it suddenly passes through the wall without leaving a trace.
The concept of tunneling had been predicted in the 1920s. In 1957, Leo Esaki, a scientist working at Sony in Japan, produced the first example of tunneling while experimenting with semiconductors, components that can conduct electricity with no resistance or loss of current. Dr. Esaki invented the tunnel diode, a type of semiconductor that is used in oscillators and amplifiers, among other devices.
Dr. Giaever later admitted that he had not been familiar with Dr. Esaki’s work and did not really understand it at first. But G.E.’s Research Lab employed more than 800 scientists, and it was at the suggestion of a colleague that he started working on tunneling experiments, using thin strips of metal separated by insulating layers.
In his classes at Rensselaer, he learned about a new theory of superconductors put forward by John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer — an idea named B.C.S. after the three scientists’ initials.
Back at the lab, he decided to create a tunneling experiment using superconductors. He created a sample of two strips of lead separated by a very thin strip of lead oxide. He then immersed the sample in liquid helium attached to an electric current detector and began doing the same type of tunneling experiments that he had done on the other strips of metal.
At first, he failed, because the lead oxide was too thick. Finally, on April 22, 1960, the experiment succeeded, and the results conformed to the predictions of the B.C.S. theory. (Dr. Bardeen, Dr. Cooper and Dr. Schrieffer shared the 1972 Nobel in Physics for their theory, helped by Dr. Giaever’s proof.)

His co-recipients of the 1973 Nobel Prize were Dr. Esaki and Dr. Brian D. Josephson.

The other thing that stood out to me:

Dr. Giaever prided himself on his common-sense approach to science, but not all his ideas were welcomed by his peers. He became a prominent denier of climate change, referring to the science around it as a “new religion.” (“I would say that, basically, global warming is a nonproblem,” he said in a 2015 speech.) He based his opposition, in part, on his belief that it is impossible to track changes in the Earth’s temperature and that, even if it could be done, the temperature changes would be insignificant.
When the American Physical Society announced in 2011 that the evidence for climate change and global warming was incontrovertible, he resigned from the society in disgust, saying: “‘Incontrovertible’ is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science.”

Posted in Obits, Physics | 1 Comment »

Anniversaries.

July 8th, 2025

I’ve been involved in some recent conversations about two things that are sort of connected.

Apparently, the word for the 250th anniversary of something is “Semiquincentennial”. Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge, also says “Sestercentennial” is acceptable. Also: “Quarter Millennium”, and in the context of the upcoming anniversary, “America250”. “America250” sounds kind of silly and undignified to me. “America! 250! With purchase of an America of equal or greater value!”

I was feeling like nobody gives a diddly squat about the Semiquincentennial. I haven’t seen people talking about it, or announced plans for a big celebration, or any commemorative items. I’m old enough to (somewhat) remember the run-up to the Bicentennial. I may even have some Bicentennial quarters somewhere.

It turns out that there’s actually a federally chartered “non-partisan” planning committee, the “United States Semiquincentennial Commission“, which was spun up in 2016. It also turns out that President Trump has created “The White House Task Force on Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday“, aka “Task Force 250”. I like “Task Force 250”. “Task Force 250, engage the guns on Mount Suribachi.”

(We watched “Sands of Iwo Jima” over the weekend. I like it, but I would not say it was one of John Wayne’s best films.)

And, of course, the NYT has to micturate all over the idea.

I wonder if we’re going to see any commemorative guns for the 250th anniversary. And I don’t mean guns like the various “Trump 2025” and “47” guns you see around. I mean some really classy commemoratives, of the kind gun makers used to issue in the old days. And speaking of the old days…

For some reason, Mike and I were talking about my Smith and Wesson Model 544, the “Texas Wagon Train Commemorative”, for the 150th anniversary of Texas independence. While we were talking, I got to wondering: did any other manufacturers issue Texas Sesquicentennial guns? Surely there was a commemorative Winchester, right? Winchester issued more commemoratives than Carter had little liver pills.

Oh, if only I had some reference work on Winchester commemorative guns. Oh, wait! I do!

Volume One of the Trolard books says that Winchester was going to produce a full-length rifle, a carbine, and a cased set with both the rifle and carbine as well as a Bowie knife. The first volume came out in 1985, so Mr. Trolard was writing ahead of actual release. (He does have photos of the guns, which I’m guessing were factory supplied.)

Then it gets weird, and frankly unclear to me. There’s a reference early on in the second volume to “the unfortunate event with the termination of the production for the Texas Sesquicentennial program”, but not much more detail than that. At least some Texas Sesquicentennial guns made it out of the factory, as you can find auctions for them online. U.S Repeating Arms Company (the parent company of Winchester at the time) shut down the Winchester commemoratives program in 1987. They contracted with Cherry’s Sporting Goods to “design, create and market” commemoratives in 1989. This is about the same time that USRA went bankrupt and was bought by Fabrique Nationale Herstal.

(Some of the Texas Sesquicentennial guns were re-purposed as Larry Bird commemoratives, per Trolard. Really, I’m not making this up. There were Larry Bird commemorative Winchesters sold through “Larry Bird’s Boston Connection” with serial numbers that started with “TSR”. “More commemoratives than Carter had little liver pills” indeed.)

And what about Colt? I’m not as up on Colts, and don’t have as many Colt references as I’d like. But it seems like Colt did a Texas Sesquicentennial commemorative Single Action Army. All the ones I have seen for sale so far have ivory grips. Here’s one example from GunBroker.

Mike the Musicologist also turned up a Colt 1860 Army Texas Sesquicentennial commemorative. The listing he found claims they are very rare: here’s one listed and sold by Collectors Firearms.

The Texas Sesquicentennial Colts are listed in the online Blue Book of Gun Values, but that’s weird, too: the site shows a “Colt 1985 Texas 150th Sesquicentennial SAA Premier Model” that looks like the SAA with ivory grips, and a “Colt 1985 Texas 150th Sesquicentennial SAA Standard Model” that looks like an 1860 Army, not a SAA.

There is also a “Texas Sam Houston 150th Sesquicentennial Deluxe U.S. Model 1847 Walker .44 Caliber Blackpowder Cap & Ball Revolver” listed on GunBroker right now, but that seems to be more of a Sam Houston commemorative than a Texas Sesquicentennial one. Also, it doesn’t look like it was produced by Colt, but made by the “United States Historical Society” using an Uberti Walker reproduction.

I kind of think it would be fun to have a collection of all the Texas Sesquicentennial guns, at least the official manufacturer produced ones. But I don’t think I want to scratch that itch right away…

…that Single Action Army with ivory grips does look pretty, though.

If any of my readers are Colt people, and can fill in some of the blanks on Colt commemoratives, or can point to a good reference work, please drop a comment here.

Posted in Coins, Colt, Guns, History, Movies, Smith and Wesson, Winchester, Wordplay | 1 Comment »

Note from the legal beat.

July 8th, 2025

A story I missed over the weekend:

Nearly Half of America’s Murderers Get Away With It

…the Louisville police do not arrest anyone in roughly half of murder cases. I spoke to family members of a dozen victims. They all conveyed a similar sentiment: that the police had abandoned them and theirs. “The police don’t really care,” said Deondra Kimble, David’s aunt. “They’ve proven it to me.”

…

Louisville is representative of a national issue. In the United States, people often get away with murder. The clearance rate — the share of cases that result in an arrest or are otherwise solved — was 58 percent in 2023, the latest year for which F.B.I. data is available. And that figure is inflated because it includes murders from previous years that police solved in 2023.
In other words, a murderer’s chance of getting caught within a year essentially comes down to a coin flip. For other crimes, clearance rates are even lower. Only 8 percent of car thefts result in an arrest.

…

Why does America solve so few crimes? Experts point to five explanations.

Number two on the list, is, of course, “guns”. There’s even a handy little graph of “Gun homicide rates, 2023”, that includes the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Spain, and Australia. Not included: Switzerland.

What this story brings to mind, though, is David Simon’s great book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. My copy is in a box somewhere, so I’m going off memory here: Lawrence can probably fill in the lacunae. (I’d buy the Kindle edition for reference, but they want $14 for that.) There’s a several page section where Simon breaks down the numbers for one year’s worth of homicides. (I believe it was 1988.)

Some of the homicides were things like vehicle accidents (remember, there’s a difference between “homicide” and “murder”). Some were self-defense incidents. Some were cases where the killer died in the act (such as arson or a murder-suicide)…

…and at the end of the day, as best as I recall, your chances of even being charged with a homicide in Baltimore that year were about one out of three. And your chances of getting a sentence of more than ten years were basically zero: you had to do something awful (like molesting and killing a child) to get more than that. And a ten year sentence, with the parole laws in effect at the time, plus time spent in prison before trial, and good time credit, meant that you were likely to get out of prison after three years.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

And for what it’s worth, the Austin Police Department cleared 100% of their homicide cases for 2023. I don’t think 2024 figures are in yet, but APD has been consistently above 90% clearance since 2014.

Posted in Austin, Cops, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Drink!

July 4th, 2025

Shot:

City of Taylor dealing with invasive duck problem

“I watched them, they stopped feeding the ducks and walked away, and those ducks immediately turned and looked at us and started coming towards my son and approaching him like ‘what are you going to give us’ and started getting a little close,” said Seguin. “Really made us uncomfortable.”

Chaser:

Posted in Bagatelle, Birds | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 4th, 2025.

July 4th, 2025

Happy Independence Day, everyone. Today marks 249 years of not giving a flying flip at a rolling doughnut what the British royal family thinks.

It is going to be a busy three-day weekend, but I did want to quickly note the death of Michael Madsen. NYT (archived).

NYT obit for Jim Shooter.

Kenneth Colley. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “The Bill”, and “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (credited as “Jesus”).

Posted in Movies, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 3, 2025.

July 3rd, 2025

Robert Holton, big damn hero. He was 81.

Taxol is a hugely important drug in cancer treatment. It was originally isolated from the yew tree, but there just aren’t enough yew trees to go around. In order to isolate the drug, the trees had to be stripped of their bark, which killed them.

Dr. Holton was the first person to figure out how to synthesize Taxol in a lab, without killing yew trees.

“I have always been drawn to difficult problems, and synthesizing Taxol was a big one,” Dr. Holton said in 2018 during remarks at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Inventors in Washington, D.C. He was elected an academy fellow that year. “Seeing the drug’s success in treating so many patients has been an incredibly gratifying experience.”
The National Cancer Institute estimates that more than one million patients have been treated with Taxol. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1992 for ovarian cancer and, in 1994, for advanced breast cancer. The chemo agent is also used for the treatment of lung cancer and Kaposi’s sarcoma, among other malignancies, Dr. Boyd said.

…

In 1994, The New York Times called Dr. Holton’s synthesis of Taxol “arguably the most important drug cobbled together by human hands.” The article also noted “the cutthroat competition” to synthesize what everyone believed was destined to become a multi-billion-dollar medication. In 1999, Bristol Myers Squibb earned $1.5 billion from sales of the drug.

Barry Longyear, SF writer. I don’t have a formal obit I can link, but Michael Swanwick put up a tribute/obit on his blog.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Diddy squat.

July 2nd, 2025

I won’t say that I didn’t care about Diddy. I did care, to the extent that it was a mildly interesting true crime story, and this is hookersnblow.com. Beyond that, meh.

But: the Wikipedia entry on the Mann Act is interesting, especially the section on “Notable prosecutions under the Mann Act“.

I’m sure everyone remembers Jack Johnson (though I didn’t remember Donald Trump pardoned him in 2018). Others: Frank Lloyd Wright (charges dropped), Charlie Chaplin (acquitted), Charles Manson (charges dropped), and Chuck Berry (convicted, sentenced to three years, served one and half).

Posted in Bagatelle, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 2, 2025.

July 2nd, 2025

Jim Shooter, Marvel comics guy.

Shooter professionalized what had been a loose company in an even looser industry, making sure books were published on time, artists were paid on time and even given royalties and health insurance.
He also had a flair for developing talent, and under his aegis Marvel put out now-classic stories from writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne on Uncanny X-Men, Frank Miller on Daredevil and Walt Simonson on Thor, among others. While the artists became among the biggest names in the industry, X-Men became not only the most dominant and influential comic of the decade and beyond, but one of the first true franchises of the industry.
With 1984’s Secret Wars, a 12-issue miniseries that Shooter, Mike Zeck and John Beatty drew, he instituted the concept of publishing crossover events, a companywide initiative that saw one main story play out and influence many of the other titles coming out for months on end. Secret Wars was a massive publishing success and a toy bonanza. It’s a concept that is still being used by Marvel and DC to this day, in varying degrees.
He took fans seriously, and just like Weisinger, called and wrote readers out of the blue. Carter Beats the Devil author Glen David Gold wrote in his 2018 memoir, I Will Be Complete, of how in the summer before he entered high school in the late 1970s, Shooter phoned after reading a SHIELD story he had sent in. Perhaps seeing something of himself in a teen writing superhero stories, Shooter was encouraging, telling the auspicious writer to read as much as he could in high school and to study science.

…

Still, while many call Shooter a “complicated man,” Larry Hama, who was writing G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero for Marvel as well as editing titles, said that he believed Shooter was always trying to do the right thing. Hama recalled on Facebook how Shooter put a writer-artist on the company’s insurance plan the day after he died in order to help out his widow. (The talent had qualified for the health and insurance plan and wanted to sign up, but Marvel policy only allowed for sign-ups on Wednesdays. The man had died on the Tuesday.)
Hama wrote, “Without hesitation, Jim took the paperwork from me and went upstairs to push it through. He said, ‘They owe it to him, we just won’t mention that he already passed.’ I witnessed him doing stuff like that several times. None of it was made public for obvious reasons. It could have cost him his job, but he did the right thing.”

Posted in Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 1, 2025.

July 1st, 2025

The last of the cousins has died.

Jimmy Swaggart.

As Jimmy Lee grew older and more certain that he was on the path of the righteous, he prayed for the salvation of his first cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, the early wild man of rock ’n’ roll who married several times (one bride was his 13-year-old cousin) and who thumbed his nose at conventional morality, as the writer Nick Tosches recounted in “Hellfire,” his biography of Mr. Lewis.
The country singer Mickey Gilley was also a first cousin to both Mr. Swaggart and Mr. Lewis. About the same age, the three boys were childhood companions. They learned to play an uncle’s piano and occasionally disobeyed their parents by going to a Black nightclub, where they were entranced by the music and dancing, Mr. Tosches wrote.

…

And he could be a hypnotic speaker. “I don’t know of anyone in America, religious or secular, who can hold a crowd better,” William Martin, a Rice University sociologist who has studied the evangelical movement, told The New York Times in 1988. Mr. Martin said a friend who was a lawyer had told him, “I don’t believe a word he says, but I don’t know anyone in the world who’s better with a closing argument.”

Posted in Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Back to back to back.

July 1st, 2025

Holidays, that is. This is one of those times of the year when we have a whole string of them in a short time.

Happy Bobby Bonilla Day, everyone!

Here’s your obligatory yearly article from the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network explaining Bobby Bonilla Day.

Posted in Sports | Comments Closed

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