Firings watch.

January 13th, 2026

Mike Tomlin is out as coach of the Steelers.

But is it a firing?

“After much thought and reflection, I have decided to step down as head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers,” Tomlin said in a statement. “This organization has been a huge part of my life for many years, and it has been an absolute honor to lead this team. I am deeply grateful to Art Rooney II and the late Ambassador Rooney for their trust and support. I am also thankful to the players who gave everything they had every day, and to the coaches and staff whose commitment and dedication made this journey so meaningful…”

This sure sounds like a resignation, not a firing. But there was a lot of speculation around the Steelers: many people expressed a belief that the team had grown stagnent under Tomlin, and there might be a change coming.

Nineteen years, never a losing season. But seven straight playoff losses, including to the Texans last night.

ESPN.

In other news, offensive coordinator Greg Roman and offensive line coach Mike Devlin are out at the worthless LA Chargers.

Sounds like a good start. Now, if they would just shut down the team, ban the players from the NFL for life, burn the stadium, practice facilities, and offices, plow the rubble into the earth, sow the ground with salt, and drive the players and staff before us while we listen to the lamentations of their women, I’d be well on my way to happy.

Kevin Patullo out as offensive coordinator in Philadelphia.

The defending champion Eagles endured a sharp decline in offensive production. Scoring dropped from 27.2 (ranked seventh) to 22.3 (19th) points per game this season; offensive efficiency dipped from fourth best in the league to 19th; and the rushing attack plummeted from 179 yards per game (2nd) to 116.9 (18th).

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | No Comments »

Obit watch: January 13, 2026.

January 13th, 2026

Scott Adams. THR.

I used to be a pretty avid follower of “Dilbert”. Back at one of my previous jobs, the running joke was that “Dilbert” was a documentary about my life. Then something happened. Mr. Adams’s…eccentricities, for want of a better word, got on my nerves. (Remember the “Dilberito“, and Mr. Adams’s idea that we didn’t need to actually, you know, eat food? We could just pills with all the nutrients we needed.)

He was still on my radar, because how could he not be? But he didn’t have the relevance for me that he once had. I’m sad he’s passed on, though.

(These days, the documentary about my life is called “The Wire”.)

Elle Simone Scott, of “America’s Test Kitchen”. I get a kick out of having “ATK” on in the background while I work.

Jirdes Winther Baxter. She was 101.

Ms. Baxter was the last known survivor of the 1925 Nome diphtheria epidemic.

A copy of medical records from 1925, possessed by Mr. Baxter, a retired lawyer, indicates that Jirdes (pronounced JER-diss) Winther, then 11 months old, was hospitalized in Nome on Jan. 30 with diphtheria and what she later called a high fever. Highly contagious, diphtheria is a dangerous bacterial disease that can clog airways, severely restricting breathing, and damage the heart and kidneys.
Jirdes’s Norwegian-born mother, Ragnhild, and one of her brothers, John, were admitted on Feb. 2. Her father, Johan, and another brother, Gudmund, did not contract the disease.
At the time, there was only one doctor, Curtis Welch, in Nome, a gold-rush town of 1,400 inhabitants. After two young children died of diphtheria by mid-January, officials there instituted a quarantine advised by Dr. Welch, who had realized that a pandemic seemed “almost inevitable.”
He sent alerts, by radio telegram, to other towns in Alaska and pleaded for emergency help from the U.S. Public Health Service. The nearest supply of antitoxin, made from the blood of horses, was at a hospital in Anchorage, 1,000 miles away.

They couldn’t fly antitoxin in by plane, the port was frozen over, and there was no train service directly to Nome.

A plan was devised to carry 300,000 units of antitoxin by train from Anchorage to the railhead of Nenana in interior Alaska, about 300 miles north. From there, sled dogs would ferry the serum 674 miles west to Nome, a relay that would involve 20 mushers and about 150 dogs. It would come to be known as the 1925 Serum Run and the Great Race of Mercy.
For days, millions were enthralled by radio and newspaper accounts of the rush to keep a threatened town alive. A front-page headline in The New York Times reported, “Serum Relief Near for Stricken Nome.”
Bill Shannon, the first musher on the relay, retrieved the serum — a 20-pound package containing glass vials housed in a metal cylinder — from the train in Nenana. He insulated the container with bearskin and took off on a 52-mile stretch as midnight approached on Jan. 27.
Mushers handed off the antitoxin and rested at roadhouses along the relay, enduring aching cold and wind and blizzards that sometimes made the trail disappear. On Feb. 2, the serum arrived in Nome after five days and seven hours, frozen but quickly thawed by Dr. Welch and administered to the sick.

Ms. Baxter had a few words to say on a subject of historical interest:

Ms. Winther Baxter believed — as many now do — that Balto, a husky that helped lead his team on the final 55-mile stretch into Nome, received heroic acknowledgment, including a statue in Central Park, at the expense of Togo, another husky who was the lead sled dog for a celebrated Norwegian-born driver named Leonhard Seppala.
Togo led his team for 261 miles — 170 to meet up with the relay and 91 on the longest, most hazardous stretch, involving a treacherous crossing of a frozen bay. Decades later, Togo received his own statue in New York, but in a less prominent location, Seward Park on the Lower East Side.
“No, no, you have it all wrong,” Ms. Winther Baxter corrected people when they mentioned the Balto statue, her granddaughter recalled her saying. “Togo was the real hero.”

Posted in Books, Food, History, Mammals, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: January 11, 2026.

January 11th, 2026

Bob Weir, of the Grateful Dead.

(the sound of eight confused men getting paid)

Stewart Cheifet. My older readers may remember him from back in the day as the host of “Computer Chronicles” on PBS.

Hessy Levinsons Taft. I confess she wasn’t that notable, but this is a fun story in historical retrospect.

When she was six months old, in 1934, her family hired a photographer to take a portrait of her. The photographer, feeling whimsical, submitted the photo as an entry for a contest “to find a baby representing the epitome of the Aryan race”.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, chose the winner.

She won the contest. Which made things rather complicated, as she and her family were Jewish.

T.K. Carter, actor. Other credits include “The Corner” (For those of you who have read the book or watched the mini-series, he was Gary McCullough. For those of you who haven’t read the book, I commend it to your attention.), “A Rage In Harlem” (1991), “Runaway Train”, and “Quincy, M.E.”.

Erich von Däniken, crank.

Mr. von Däniken was 32 and managing a hotel in Davos, Switzerland, when he published his first and by far most popular book, “Chariots of the Gods,” in 1968. In breathless prose, saturated with exclamation points and folksy interjections such as “Hey, presto!” Mr. von Däniken posited that virtually the sum of human knowledge and ability had been bestowed by extraterrestrials.
With little evidence and a lot of innuendo, he proclaimed that the Egyptian pyramids could have been built only with alien expertise. (“Is it really a coincidence that the height of the pyramid of Cheops multiplied by a thousand million — 98,000,000 miles — corresponds approximately to the distance between the earth and sun?” he wrote.)
The birdman cult of Easter Island, Mr. von Däniken declared, developed as a way to honor the supreme beings who had flitted down from the outer atmosphere to land on that remote spot in the Pacific, off the coast of South America.
Because an iron rod in a temple in Delhi, India, appeared impervious to rust, it must have been made from a celestial alloy, he insisted. Similarly, he said, when viewed from the air, the geoglyphs of Nazca, Peru, are obvious landing strips for spaceships. And artwork on a Mayan sarcophagus depicts not a king descending into the underworld, he concluded, but an astronaut-god piloting a spaceship.

It sounds ridiculous, but people bought into this [stuff]. Including me. In my defense, I was left unsupervised. Also, I was very young at the time. (See also.)

Over the next half century, he published over 40 more books, which were translated into some 30 languages, and though none of them offered much variation from his original themes or ideas — subsequent titles included “Gods From Outer Space,” “The Gods Were Astronauts” and “Arrival of the Gods” — they collectively sold more than 70 million copies.

…

Mr. von Däniken wrote his second book from prison. In 1970, a Swiss court convicted him of fraud, forgery and embezzlement, determining that, as a hotel manager, he had falsified financial records to subsidize what the court called a “playboy” lifestyle. He served about a third of a three-and-a-half-year sentence.
Critics pointed to Mr. von Däniken’s criminal history as proof of a penchant for deception. But Mr. von Däniken seemed unfazed, even comparing himself to Jesus. “People don’t ask if Christ was convicted of a crime,” he told Playboy in 1974. “What has that to do with the message Christ brought?”

Posted in Books, Geek, History, Movies, Music, Nazis, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Random gun (and other) crankery.

January 10th, 2026

One of my Christmas presents to myself was to take a gun off layaway at my local dealer.

I’m not ready to show it off yet. I want Mike to see it first, and I’ve warned him that his eyes are going to roll so hard they may pop out of his head. Let me just say that this gun combines 1.5 of this blogger’s obsessions. More later on.

One of my other Christmas presents to myself was a replacement for Project e. While it was (and still is, to some extent) a fine machine, the CPU and memory are quite limited. You can’t even get an Ubuntu distro for it any longer, as far as I can tell. It still powers on, but I was getting a lot of fan noise out of it, too. I think it is time for it to go into retirement.

The new machine is a Lenovo ThinkPad P15S – I believe this is a gen 2, with an i7-10510U processor and a discrete NVIDA T500 GPU. It is a lot larger (I’d say about twice the size) than Proect e, but several times more powerful. This was a Discount Electronics purchase when they were looking to dump inventory a few weeks ago, and I upgraded the SSD and RAM when I ordered it. (I also got six months free financing.)

Other than replacing Project e, I wanted to get a personal computer for myself. I’ve been doing a lot (well, pretty much all) of my personal stuff on my work laptop, and that doesn’t seem like a good situation for obvious reasons. I want to start moving files and personal stuff off the work laptop and onto this one. Of course, that’s more difficult than you might think, because Cisco, as a security measure, has locked down all the corporate machines so you can no longer use any removable media. I think I can still copy stuff to the cloud.

Right now, the new device has Windows 11 Pro on it. I’m keeping it there for two reasons:

1) I also signed up, at the end of the year, for the Certified Ethical Hacker certification from Colorado State. They specify Mac or Windows for the coursework. I didn’t want to try running the courseware on my work Mac (and possibly running into infosec issues) so I figured I’d get a dedicated Windows laptop for the course, and once I finish the cert, install some flavor of LINUX on it.

2) I also need to do my taxes this year. I think there may be a LINUX tax software package, but I’ve never used it. I can get the H&R Block tax software, which I prefer, for Windows. The past few years, I’ve installed it on my work Mac, but I think I’m going to stop doing that this year.

Why not just get a new personal Mac instead? I’m waiting for the M5 Pro Max laptops. Once those come out, and as long as everything holds together, I plan to purchase a fully blown and stoked M5 Pro Max (or whatever Apple calls it) for personal use. Project L (the Lenovo) will then become a dedicated security research machine.

I’ve messed around a little with the Windows version of hashcat so far, and I think I’m getting pretty good performance with that. I also want to see how it performs ripping DVDs with Handbrake. I do expect performance improvements in both these areas when I move Project L to UNIX.

I also want to go back to messing around more with SDR. I have one of those TV tuner based SDR kits, but I haven’t done anything with it because I felt my existing machines were too slow. Now that I have something a bit more modern than 2009…

And speaking of SDR, I also want to pick back up experimenting with Bluetooth. Though, again, I think that’s going to have to wait for UNIX. It is also going to have to wait for me to figure out what the current state of Bluetooth probing devices is: the Ubertooth One is out of production and deprecated. Just based on a preliminary Google search it looks like the state of the art has shifted to higher-end SDR devices.

Going back to guns for a minute, I do have a “gun” coming from Amazon on Monday. I’ll blog that when I can, as it answers the question: what happens to a dream deferred?

And I have a huge backlog of gun books to blog, once I can get picture uploads to work again.

Busier than a one-armed man in a calf-milking contest, indeed. I’m just hoping to hold everything together.

Posted in Apple, Bluetooth, Books, Christmas, Geek, Guns, Project L, project_e, Radio, SDR | No Comments »

I Ran (So Far Away)

January 9th, 2026

(Did you know that “A Flock of Seagulls” (the first album) was a concept album about alien abduction? At least, that’s what Genius says.)

I am not an expert in geopolitics. I am especially not an expert in Iranian politics. Lawrence can probably point you in the right direction on that front.

But, back when I was attending St. Ed’s and studying “Modern Revolutions” with Dr. Sanchez, she had us read Iran Awakening: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country by Shirin Ebadi.

(Actually, Dr. Sanchez just asked us to read the first half of the book. I read the whole thing, because I’m an overachiever. Also, I liked Dr. Sanchez – not in that way, she was already married – and wanted to impress her.)

Anyway, one thing vividly stood out to me from that book.

Dr. Ebadi was a judge form 1969 forward, during the reign of Shah Reza Pahlavi. She describes the elation she, and her friends, felt at the Revolution, and how happy they were to see the Shah deposed and the new regime come in.

A week later, the new bosses called her into the office.

They told her, “Women can’t be judges in Islam. You can either be a janitor or a librarian.”

Point being: be careful what you wish for. You may just get it.

Posted in Birds, Books, History, Music, School | No Comments »

Six!

January 8th, 2026

Mike McDaniel out as head coach of the Miami Dolphins.

Four seasons, 35-33 overall, 7-10 this season.

McDaniel’s first two seasons in Miami corresponded with a high-octane offense, back-to-back playoff berths for the first time since the early 2000s. That achievement put him alongside Don Shula and Dave Wannstedt as the only coaches in franchise history to make the postseason in their first two years.
Everything changed in 2024. Two games into the season and the Dolphins down 31-10 to the Buffalo Bills, Tagovailoa sustained a concussion. Miami would go 1-3 during Tagovailoa’s four-game stint on injured reserve. His return would yield middling results — the Dolphins went 5-4 but lost key matchups to the Green Bay Packers and Houston Texans — before he once again was injured, this time with a hip.

More from ESPN.

Also: Josh Grizzard out as offensive coordinator and Thad Lewis out as offensive assistant in Tampa Bay.

John Morton out as offensive coordinator in Detroit.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | No Comments »

Obit watch: January 7, 2026.

January 7th, 2026

Michael Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s son with Jane Wyman. He was 80.

As the chairman and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation, he supported causes and topics his father heralded in working to preserve the former president’s legacy, according to the foundation’s website.
In a letter on the foundation’s site, Mr. Reagan said he was most proud of his father’s “steadfast dedication to individual liberty and global democracy and the positive impact these values had upon our nation and our world.”
He often worked as a radio host, sometimes filling in on the talk radio host Michael Jackson’s show and had his own program, “The Michael Reagan Show.” In addition, he wrote many columns for various outlets, including Newsmax, the right-wing cable channel and site.

This is a few days old, but I’ve been holding it until I had enough obits to do a round-up: Diane Crump.

On Feb. 7, 1969, Crump became the first professional female jockey to compete at a track in the United States where betting was legal. A month later, she won the first of her 228 career victories, which brought her mounts earnings of nearly $1.3 million.
She won 24 races that year, even though her reception in the male-dominated world of horse racing remained mostly unenthusiastic. She went on to become the first female jockey to ride in the Triple Crown’s most prestigious race, the Kentucky Derby, on May 2, 1970.

And, finally, last and least: Aldrich Ames is burning in Hell. LawDog.

The son of an alcoholic C.I.A. officer, Mr. Ames failed upward through the agency ranks for 17 years until he attained a headquarters post of extraordinary sensitivity.

…

The K.G.B. took care of him — he was paid at least $2,705,000 — and it took care of its own turncoats. As many as 10 Soviet and Soviet-bloc spies were arrested, interrogated and executed for treason. One was imprisoned. At least two escaped, one step ahead of their pursuers. The network that had provided the United States with political, military, diplomatic and intelligence insights on Moscow was destroyed.

Posted in History, Horses, Law, Obits | No Comments »

Five!

January 6th, 2026

John Harbaugh out as head coach of the Baltimore Ravens.

193-124 in 18 seasons. He was the “second-longest tenured coach” in the NFL (behind Mike Tomlin of the Steelers).

More from ESPN.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | No Comments »

Firings watch.

January 6th, 2026

Steve Phelps out as NASCAR commissioner.

Technically, this is a resignation, but I’m counting it as a firing because it seems to be one of those “resign and keep your dignity, or stay on and get fired” situations. This is all fallout from the great NASCAR anti-trust case.

Two teams, Front Row Motorsports and 23XI Racing (the latter partially owned by Michael Jordan) sued NASCAR over alleged monopolistic behavior. The case was settled in December.

But anybody who knows anything about the legal system knows that stuff comes out in discovery. Often, that’s stuff you don’t want to come out. (“Don’t put anything in writing that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the Washington Post.”) Mr. Phelps apparently said some regrettable things, though the NYPost only cites one specific example:

In one exchange, Phelps called Hall of Fame team owner Richard Childress “a stupid redneck” who “needs to be taken out back and flogged.”
That led Bass Pro Shops founder Johnny Morris, an ardent supporter of both NASCAR and Richard Childress Racing, to write a letter demanding Phelps’ removal as commissioner.

In other news, Matt Eberflus out as defensive coordinator in Dallas.

The above by way of Lawrence, who also sent over an interesting fact from Yahoo Sports that I don’t have room for elsewhere:

The New York Jets are the first team since 1933 (when the NFL started keeping this stat) to go an entire season without intercepting a pass. Not one.

…no team has recorded fewer than two in a single season. The 2018 San Francisco 49ers team was the previous worst in this category with two, one fewer than both the Houston Texans in 2020 and the Houston Oilers in 1982. Only two other teams in NFL history have failed to record five interceptions in a single season.

Edited to add: and, of course, within minutes of my posting this, Lawrence emailed again to let me know Kliff Kingsbury and Joe Whitt Jr. are out as offensive and defensive coordinators (respectively) for the Washington Commanders.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | No Comments »

Blood! Blood in the streets!

January 5th, 2026

As foretold in the prophecy, this is your annual Monday morning after the end of the season NFL firing thread.

Raheem Morris out as coach in Atlanta. Also fired: GM Terry Fontenot. (Sorry about the ESPN link: the Atlanta newspaper won’t even let you look at the front page with an adblocker on.) Morris had been with the team for two seasons and had a 16-18 record: Fontenot had been with the team for five years.

One of my Christmas presents was a delightful little book: Cleveland’s Greatest Disasters! Speaking of Cleveland and disasters, Kevin Stefanski out as head coach of the Browns. But they kept GM Andrew Berry. Stefanski had been with the team for six seasons, and went 45-56 in the regular season. The Browns finished 5-12 this year, and 8-26 over the past two seasons.

I’ll update this post if there are more firings today.

Edited to add: and now, as expected by pretty much everyone, Pete Carroll is out as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. He was 3-14 in his one season. But hey! The Raiders have the number one draft choice! And they’re keeping John Spytek as GM! (Again, sorry about the ESPN link, but the Oakland newspaper is…not good.)

Edited to add 2: Four! A-ha-ha! (Okay, technically, the Atlanta firing was the yearly “you didn’t even wait to get the [man] in the house” firing.)

Jonathan Gannon out as head coach of the Arizona Cardinals. They were 3-14 this year, and 15-36 in three seasons with Gannon as the coach.

Heading into Sunday’s game against the Rams, Arizona had 42 different players miss a combined 309 games with injury and had 25 players on injured reserve — the most in the NFL — including quarterback Kyler Murray, running backs James Conner and Trey Benson and wide receiver Marvin Harrison Jr.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 2, 2026.

January 2nd, 2026

Back on the train.

Philip Schreier, director of the NRA Museums, passed away on Monday.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Schreier, but by all accounts he was a swell guy.

Throughout his career, Phil was a trusted and respected voice within the firearms community. He became the public face of the NRA through countless television appearances and public engagements, always warmly received wherever he went. Phil was not only an ambassador for the NRA but also a devoted advocate for the Second Amendment.

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, former senator from Colorado.

Irreverent, blunt and independent, the rough-hewed Mr. Campbell was a fiscal conservative and a social liberal who favored gun rights and abortion rights, billed himself as the champion of the average voter and refused to be bound by party lines. He switched allegiance from the Democrats to the Republicans in 1995.

…

From 1960 to 1964, Mr. Campbell studied Japanese and judo at a university in Japan. He won 48 of 50 tournament matches, earned a gold medal at the Pan American Games in 1963 and joined the United States judo team at the 1964 Olympics. (He tore a ligament, lost his first match and retired from active competition, ranked fourth in the world.)

Isiah Whitlock Jr., actor. Other credits include “Cocaine Bear”, “Law and Order”, “L&O: Criminal Intent”, “L&O: SVU”, and “Lightyear”.

Cecilia Giménez. You probably don’t recognize the name, but you may recognize this:

The group called her “a great painting enthusiast” and acknowledged Mrs. Giménez’s efforts to restore the nearly century-old fresco of Jesus. “Because of the poor state of conservation, Cecilia, with the best intentions, decided to repaint over the work,” it said.
But when Mrs. Giménez’s handiwork came to light in August 2012, the authorities initially suspected that the church had suffered an act of vandalism. The delicate misery on the face of Christ en route to the crucifixion had been replaced by a misshapen head.

…

But her artistic mishap created an economic boon for Borja, a town of 5,000 inhabitants.
Tourists flocked to see her efforts. Less than three years later, more than 150,000 visitors from Japan, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere had made a trip to Borja, paying one euro, about $1.20, to view her work under a protective clear cover.
Local officials told The Times in 2014 that the tourism spike had stabilized the town’s restaurant industry and helped the area’s institutions. The nearby Museo de la Colegiata, which houses religious medieval art, experienced a rise in annual visits to 70,000, from 7,000. Vineyards in the region squabbled over the rights to put Mrs. Giménez’s Christ on their labels. In 2016, two Americans even staged an opera about the affair in the same church.

Louis V. Gerstner, former IBM CEO.

Posted in Art, Guns, Obits, Politics, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: December 28, 2025.

December 28th, 2025

Brigitte Bardot. THR.

After making nearly 50 features, she dedicated her life to defending animal rights. Through her Fondation Brigitte Bardot, created in 1986, she took on such issues as seal hunting, poaching, the fur trade, bullfighting, the captivity of wild animals in zoos and circuses, conditions in slaughterhouses and the farming of horse meat.
“I gave my beauty and my youth to men,” she said. “I am going to give my wisdom and experience, the best of me, to animals.”
Bardot supported National Front candidates including Catherine Megret and Marine Le Pen and spoke out against the “Islamisation” of France. A 1996 interview in Le Figaro had her condemned for inciting racial hatred, while a paragraph in her book comparing homosexuals and pedophiles was widely criticized.

Few of Ms. Bardot’s movies were serious cinematic undertakings, and she later told a French newspaper that she considered “La Vérité,” Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Oscar-nominated 1960 crime drama, the only good film she ever made.

Posted in Movies, Obits | No Comments »

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