I almost forgot (because it is Saturday) to wish everyone a happy Gavrilo Princip Day!
Please remember to make a toast to the late guffaw.
Perhaps by next year I’ll have found a nice FN 1910.
Happy holiday!
June 28th, 2025Obit watch: June 27, 2025.
June 27th, 2025Fred Espenak, astrophysicist. He was known as “Mr. Eclipse”.
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In the early 1990s, Mr. Espenak began writing NASA’s eclipse bulletins with the Canadian meteorologist Jay Anderson. He also started a website for the space agency devoted to eclipse data. His goal: simplify and democratize complicated data so nonscientists sky gazers could geek out on the data, too.
All the while, he kept chasing eclipses — traveling to Kenya, Indonesia, Mexico, Aruba, Turkey, Zambia, Antarctica, Spain, Libya and beyond.
Lalo Schifrin. He was 93, and dang, what a career.
(Edited to add 6/28: NYT obit, which just went up today.)
The workaholic Schifrin received Oscar nominations for his scores for Cool Hand Luke (1967), The Fox (1968), Voyage of the Damned (1976), The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Sting II (1983) and for the song “People Alone” from The Competition (1980).
He scored Dirty Harry (1971) and the sequels Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988), all starring Clint Eastwood — the filmmaker presented him with his Oscar — and served as the composer on all three of the Rush Hour films.
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His résumé also included work on Coogan’s Bluff (1968) — that kicked off his long association with Eastwood and director Don Siegel — Kelly’s Heroes (1970), Charley Varrick (1973), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Telefon (1977), The Nude Bomb (1980), Black Moon Rising (1986), Money Talks (1997), Something to Believe In (1998), Tango (1998), Bringing Down the House (2003) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004).
An inspired Bruce Lee worked out to the show’s score in his gym in Hong Kong before signing Schifrin as the composer and orchestrator on Enter the Dragon (1973). As a bonus, Lee gave the musician his first martial arts lessons, for free.
Schifrin concocted a jazz waltz in 3/4 time for the theme to the Mike Connors series Mannix — also produced by Geller — and played the Moog synthesizer on the opening music for another 1960s’ CBS drama, Medical Center.
Schifrin also was responsible for the themes for T.H.E. Cat, Petrocelli, Starsky & Hutch, Bronk and Most Wanted. And his “Tar Sequence” music from Cool Hand Luke was adopted by ABC affiliates for their Eyewitness News broadcasts.
IMDB.
Rick Hurst, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Return of the Killer Shrews”, “Supertrain”, and “Murder, She Wrote”.
Carolyn McCarthy, former Congresswoman from Long Island and prominent gun control advocate.
I bet you thought I wasn’t going to post this, didn’t you? Yes, I’ve used it before (though not in this version) but for my money, I think this is the greatest TV theme of all time. (Though I admit it does have some stiff competition.)
Loser update: June 27, 2025.
June 27th, 2025We are exactly at the halfway point of the baseball season, though the All-Star Game doesn’t take place until July 15th.
Seems like a good time to do a loser update.
I think we’ve narrowed it down to two teams of significant interest.
The Chicago White Sox are at 26-55, for a .321 winning percentage. By my projections, that works out to 110 losses. Better than last year, and not record setting, but still pretty awful.
The Colorado Rockies are at 18-63, for a .222 winning percentage. As a caliber, .222 isn’t bad, but .224 is better. As a record, that works out to a projected 126 losses, which would be record setting. .222 would also be the lowest winning percentage in the modern (1901 and later) era, beating out the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics.
Short gun crankery update.
June 27th, 2025A while back, I quoted a report from the “Recoil” website that BATFE had banned imports of non-lethal training ammunition, such as Simunition.
“Recoil” is now reporting that BATFE has reversed that ban, on ATF Ruling 2025-2, “effective immediately”.
As they point out, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the manufacturers will resume selling to non law enforcement and military customers, but at least the legal impediments are out of the way.
(Hattip: Greg Ellifritz’s “Weekend Knowledge Dump”.)
Administrative note.
June 26th, 2025It got really busy up in here in terms of obits, especially late in the day.
I’m going to wait until tomorrow, as is this blog’s policy, to let things shake out. The paper of record has probably had Bill Moyers in the can for years, but I’m sure there’s going to be some sort of update or correction.
Obit watch: June 24, 2025.
June 24th, 2025Bobby Sherman. NYT (archived). Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, and “Flying High”.
NYT obit for Blake Farenthold.
Aki Aleong, actor. He was “Colonel Quoc” in an episode of “Airwolf” and “General Quoc” in “Braddock: Missing in Action III”, so he must have gotten promoted a few times in four years. Other credits include “Mancuso, FBI”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “The Wackiest Ship in the Army”, and three episodes of “Babylon 5”.
Obit watch: June 23, 2025.
June 23rd, 2025NYT obit for Fred Smith, which went up sometime yesterday after I posted.
FedEx was conceived in a paper that Mr. Smith wrote as a Yale University undergraduate in 1965. He argued that an increasingly automated economy would depend on fast and dependable door-to-door shipping of small packages containing computer parts. He got a C.
Today, FedEx employs more than half a million people and operates the world’s largest fleet of cargo aircraft. On an average day, the company ships more than 16 million packages in about 220 countries and territories.
The story about Mr. Smith getting a “C” goes around a lot, but I haven’t seen a reliable citation for it. Wikipedia (I know, I know) has it flagged as “citation needed”. You would think if it was true, the NYT would have more detail.
Gunilla Knutson, model. You probably don’t remember the name, but if you are of a certain age (Hi, pigpen51!) you remember the commercial.
Great and good friend of the blog Joe D. pointed out in comments that Blake Farenthold, former Congressman and Austin BBS personality, has passed away. AP obit.
Obit watch: June 22, 2025.
June 22nd, 2025Frederick W. Smith, founder and former CEO of FedEx. NYPost. Nothing in the paper of record yet.
Lynn Hamilton, actress. Other credits include “Hunter”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “Lady Sings the Blues”, “The Marcus-Nelson Murders” (the pilot for “Kojak”)…
…and “Mannix”. (“Tooth of the Serpent“, season 3, episode 15. This is actually a pretty solid episode.)
Jack Betts, actor. Other credits include “The Assassination of Trotsky”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Dead Men Don’t Die”.
News from the publishing world.
June 20th, 2025The NYPost informs us that Tiffany Henyard, the former mayor of Dolton, Illinois, whose antics have provided us with much entertainment over the past few years, has a new venture.
She’s writing a book, Standing on Business.
$99?! I would certainly be willing to buy her book, probably as a Christmas/birthday present for Lawrence (who, as I’ve noted before, is a connoisseur of books by disgraced politicians) but not for no $99! $9.99 is about my limit.
And, no, that’s not a typo. Here’s a link to the book’s page on the “Big Cartel” website. Here’s a link to her Facebook post, for those of you who swing that way. However, I can’t get the link in her Facebook post to come up.
Flaming hyena update.
June 17th, 2025Former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Brian K. Williams pleaded guilty Monday to a federal charge linked to a fake bomb threat he made to City Hall last year.
Williams entered a plea in downtown Los Angeles to a single federal count of threats regarding fire and explosives, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
LAPD officers responded to City Hall to investigate the threat Williams reported. Police searched the building and did not locate any suspicious packages or devices. Williams described to police the threatening call he claimed to have received, showed them the record of an incoming call that appeared as a blocked number on his city-issued cell phone and said it was the unknown man who conveyed the threat, court papers show.
In fact, that incoming call record was the call Williams had placed to himself from the Google Voice app on his personal cell phone, federal prosecutors said.
Hattip: Mike the Musicologist.
Obit watch: June 17, 2025.
June 17th, 2025William Langewiesche, writer.
He wrote a fair amount of stuff about aviation, especially a famous piece on EgyptAir 990.
I used to be an admirer of his work, especially his aviation stuff. I generally try to avoid speaking ill of the dead when I write these obits, but there are some things I think need to be said about Mr. Langewiesche’s work.
Writing about Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III’s famous landing of a commercial airliner in the Hudson River in 2009, Mr. Langewiesche made the case that that injury-free belly flop was a testament more to modern airplane technology than to the heroism of the pilot.
Captain Sullenberger took issue with that account, telling The New York Times that Mr. Langewiesche’s book about the episode, “Fly by Wire,” contained “misstatements of fact.”
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Unmentioned in the obit: his accusation that members of the NYFD looted stores at ground zero before the towers collapsed. I think it is fair to say that accusation has been refuted.
Also unmentioned in the obit: his involvement in the Chevron Corp. v. Donziger pollution case.
Travel day.
June 16th, 2025Heading home this morning. I figure I’ll be waiting a while in the airport, I have a two-hour layover, and I expect to get home around 1700 CDT (depending).
Blogging will still be as time and space permits, but I think the inbound trip will be less of a time sink than the outbound trip.