NFL announcers are maroons. At least, according to Gregg Easterbrook.
Why?
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
TMQ Watch: November 27, 2018.
November 29th, 2018Obit watch: November 28, 2018.
November 28th, 2018For the historical record: Stephen Hillenburg, creator of “SpongeBob SquarePants”.
Jeeez. 57 is way too young. Also, ALS stinks.
Obit watch: November 27, 2018.
November 27th, 2018For the historical record, because I really have nothing to say about the man: Bernardo Bertolucci.
Ricky Jay.
November 25th, 2018He was a personal hero of mine, but I never met him or even saw him perform. Somehow, it seems like he never came through Austin. (A friend of mine told me a great story about seeing him live: I hope that person will post that story on their own blog.)
I’ve said before that my three favorite magicians are Penn, Teller, and Ricky Jay. But I admired Jay as a magic historian as well.
NYT. The legendary New Yorker profile.
It is the Daileys’ impression—a perception shared by other dealers in rare books and incunabula—that Jay spends a higher proportion of his disposable income on rare books and artifacts than anyone else they know. His friend Janus Cercone has described him as “an incunable romantic.”
“Probably, no matter how much money he had, he would be overextended bibliomaniacally—or should the word be ‘bibliographically’? Anyway, he’d be overextended,” William Dailey has said. “The first time I met him, I recognized him as a complete bibliomaniac. He’s not a complete monomaniac about books on magic, but within that field he is remarkably focussed. His connoisseurship is impeccable, in that he understands the entire context of a book’s emergence. He’s not just interested in the book’s condition. He knows who printed it, and he knows the personal struggle the author went through to get it printed.”
I don’t know what else I can say, except that the world is a smaller, colder, and less interesting place today.
TMQ Watch: November 20, 2018.
November 25th, 2018How about that Chiefs-Rams game on Monday night?
If you didn’t like the Chiefs at Rams game, then you don’t like football.
And didn’t someone write something a while back about how ESPN gets stuck with bad games?
After the jump, the rest of this week’s TMQ…
Obit watch: November 25, 2018.
November 25th, 2018Catching up:
Bob McNair, owner of the Houston Texans. NYT.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Does his family sell the team for tax reasons? If so, do they sell it to someone in Houston? Who? Tillman Fertitta?
Nicolas Roeg, noted director. The only thing of his I’ve watched is “The Man Who Fell To Earth” back over thirty years ago. (Lawrence, last night: “How long was the version you watched? Two hours or three?” Me: “I think it was four days.”) I just bought “Don’t Look Now” on Criterion (but we’re saving that for next October), and I’ve had the DVD of “Walkabout” for quite a while now but haven’t watched it…
Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?
November 25th, 2018Larry Fedora fired as head coach at the University of North Carolina.
UNC was 2-9 this season and 3-9 last year. Fedora was 45-43 overall in seven seasons, and 28-28 in conference.
Kliff Kingsbury is apparently done at Texas Tech, though this is being couched as “sources say”. There was supposed to be a press conference an hour ago.
35-40 overall in six seasons and 19-35 in Big 12 games.
The Red Raiders lost to Baylor 35-24 on Saturday, ending their third consecutive losing season and fourth in five years.
Under Kingsbury, the Red Raiders also failed to break .500 every year in Big 12 play, extending that streak to nine seasons in a row.
Obit watch: November 20, 2018.
November 20th, 2018Andrew Fitzgerald passed away last week at the age of 87.
There’s a chance you may have heard of Mr. Fitzgerald. He was the last surviving member of the four man crew of the Coast Guard lifeboat CG-36500.
At 5:50 AM on February 18, 1952, the oil tanker Pendleton broke in half off Cape Cod during a severe storm. The crew of the CG-36500 went out and rescued 32 out of 33 men off the stern half of the ship. (One man drowned during the rescue, and the eight men who were in the bow were also lost at sea.)
There are a lot of people who think this is one of the greatest rescues in the history of the Coast Guard. I can’t do it justice here. You should really go read the entire obituary. There’s also a 2016 Disney film (which I haven’t seen), “The Finest Hours”, based on the book by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman.
In 2002, a 50th-anniversary reunion of the rescue crew was held at the historic Mariners House in Boston’s North End. The four also returned to Chatham for an outing on the CG-36500. Mr. Maske died in 2003, Mr. Livesey in 2007 and Mr. Webber in 2009.
The inscription on their Coast Guard medals read, “In testimony of heroic deeds in saving life from the perils of water.”
Obit watch: November 19, 2018.
November 19th, 2018She was most famous as Harriet Oleson, Nellie’s mother on “Little House on the Prairie”. But she did have a bit of a career before that: an uncredited role in “On the Waterfront”, guest shots on “Emergency”, “Ironside”…
…and, yes, she was in two episodes of “Mannix”: “The World Between” and “Run Till Dark”.
Random notes: November 18, 2018.
November 18th, 2018A few things I’ve stumbled across over the past couple of days:
“I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It.” In which the author visits 30 cities, eats 330 burgers, names a burger place in Portand as having the best burger in the country…and five months later, the places closes.
I like this story: it’s a good discussion of the impact of criticism on dining establishments, especially smaller ones. But it’s also frustrating: as it turns out, there was more going on with the burger place than just simply being named “best burger in the country”.
Recently retweeted by Popehat:
Okay. History time!
You’ve probably seen photos of Commonwealth war cemeteries, with rows of white graves. They’re heartbreaking images.
What you DON’T see are the thousands of small, tragic stories on each gravestone.
So I’m going to share some with you here. /1 #history #WW1 pic.twitter.com/wr3ucIyMYZ
— John Bull (@garius) October 5, 2018
I don’t like and don’t read the Huffington Post. But this (also by way of Popehat):
Glybera is a drug developed in Canada. It’s a hugely effective treatment for a rare genetic condition, lipoprotein lipase disorder. People with this disorder can’t metabolize fat. Their blood literally turns white from all the suspended fat in their bloodstream.
One round of treatment with Glybera can fix this genetic condition. Only 31 people have ever been treated with the drug, and it is no longer available.
Why? One possible reason: a round of treatment costs one million dollars. (But a round of treatment, as far as anyone’s been able to determine, is a permanent cure. This is a drug that literally edits genes.) And this isn’t a “oh, health care in the US stinks” story: the drug was only used in Canada and Europe, pretty much on an experimental basis, before it was pulled.
On the historic significance of “Hee Haw”:
A few words on Hee Haw, following Roy Clark’s passing…
It is, possibly, one of the most interesting and important shows in American television history.
Really.
I’m not talking about its jokes or production. Many other things made it interesting and important.
Here goes…
— Gabe Bullard (@gbullard) November 16, 2018
Coincidences.
November 17th, 2018In one of those odd historical coincidences, exactly ten years to the day after the Heidi Bowl…
…was the one and only telecast of “The Stars Wars Holiday Special”.
Historical note, suitable for use in schools.
November 17th, 201850 years ago today, at about 3 PM Central Time on November 17, 1968, the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders began a football game.
Obit watch: November 16, 2018.
November 16th, 2018Roy Clark. NYT. Nashville Tennessean.
William Goldman, noted writer. I loved Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade and I keep looking for more of Goldman’s books.
Also, I should look for a copy of “The Ghost & the Darkness” while I’m out and about this weekend.
One more from the road.
November 15th, 2018
I took this one with the baby Nikon and did a little editing on the phone. This is another one that I think came out pretty well: I wanted to get the two graves in front of Geronimo’s into the shot as well, and those markers are actually legible (if you view the photo at full size).
(If you can’t read them, the one on the left is Eva Geronimo Godeley, daughter of Geronimo and Zi-Yeh. Zi-Yeah, one of Geronimo’s wives, is on the right.)
TMQ Watch: November 13, 2018.
November 14th, 2018Sorry about last week, folks, but between the elections and our wanderings over the state of Oklahoma (motto: “It’s not Scotland.”) we just flat ran out of time before this week’s edition rolled around.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…