Obit watch: June 18, 2018.

June 18th, 2018

A large handful of interesting obits showed up over the weekend. I decided I’d save them and do a round-up today.

Officer Norberto Ramon of the Houston Police Department passed away on Friday. He had been undergoing treatment for colon cancer, but was told it had spread and was incurable. He intended to seek medical treatment in Oklahoma, but, as it turned out, this was right before Harvey hit Houston…

Prior to the storm, Ramon had been assigned desk duty. Flooding prevented him from getting to the office, so he went to the nearest station, the Lake Patrol, to help while the storm raged.
At Lake Patrol, he filled in for an officer of the seven-man squad. He worked nonstop for three days, seeing adults, seniors and mostly children to safety.

The HPD estimates he rescued 1,500 people during the storm. Officer Ramon was 55 years old, and had been with HPD for 25 years.

Reinhard Hardegen, German submarine commander who sank two ships off Long Island in 1942.

Yvette Horner, noted French accordion player.

…her considerable legend was rooted in the years she spent as a distinctive part of the grand caravan that accompanies the Tour de France, the sprawling French bicycle race. For more than a decade in the 1950s and ’60s she played for the crowds from atop one vehicle or another as the caravan made its way along the tour route ahead of the cyclists.

William Reese, rare book dealer. I was previously unaware of Mr. Reese or his shop, but after reading his obit, I want a copy of Six Score: The 120 Best Books on the Range Cattle Industry. Stuff like that is already up my alley anyway.

Stephen Reid, bank robber and author.

Along with Patrick Mitchell, who was known as Paddy, and Lionel Wright, Mr. Reid was a member of a group of well-dressed bandits who came to be known as the The Stop Watch Gang. The name appeared to have come from F.B.I. investigators who noticed that at least one gang member, usually Mr. Reid, wore a stopwatch around his neck to keep holdups within the group’s self-imposed two-minute time limit.
While there is no precise accounting of their crimes, the police have estimated that the gang participated in at least 100 holdups during the 1970s and ′80s, getting away with about $15 million.

Matt “Guitar” Murphy, Blues Brother and noted sideman.

Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post has published an obit for Gardner Dozois, as best as I can tell.

Posted in Books, Cops, History, Law, Movies, Music, Nazis, Obits | Comments Closed

Some days you get the bull…

June 15th, 2018

I’m not a huge fan of bull riding (though I do think it is much more interesting than soccer), and I don’t care much for “People” magazine.

But, as an amateur medical geek, when I see a phrase like “first person to survive the procedure at the hospital this century”, it kind of makes me take notice.

Wyatt Bruesch was competing in an Idaho rodeo when the bull he was riding bucked him off and trampled him fatally.

After he was airlifted to the Portneuf Medical Center in Pocatello, he flatlined three times in the emergency room.

The emergency department decided on a hail mary pass: an “emergency department thoracotomy.”

“You don’t perform it until the patient is literally at death’s doorstep and about to die,” Drew McRoberts, Portneuf Medical Center‘s trauma director, told People. “The odds of surviving an ED thoracotomy are extremely low, which is why they’re rarely done.”

Here’s the Trauma.org page on the subject (it’s also linked in the article itself).

Emergency department thoracotomy is a life-saving procedure in a select group of patients. Exactly who these patients are is a matter of some controversy in the trauma literature. There is a significant amount of published data on the indications for and outcomes of resuscitative thoracotomy. However the results of interventions varies widely, as does each unit’s experience, puclished data ranging for 11 patients in 10 years to 950 patients in 23 years…
Overall survival of patients undergoing emergency thoracotomy is between 4 and 33% depending on the protocols used in individual departments. The main determinants for survivability of an emergency thoracotomy are the mechanism of injury (stab, gunshot or blunt), location of injury and the presence or absence of vital signs.

Anyway:

Acting quickly, trauma surgeon Jorge Amorim cut Wyatt’s chest open and massaged his heart by hand to get it beating again.
“He basically saved his life,” McRoberts said. “He also did something else. Dr. Amorim reached into the chest cavity and squeezed and held the hilum of the lung where the great vessels come into the lung. He continued to squeeze for 15 minutes, which stopped the bleeding as Wyatt was rushed to an operating room.”

Mr. Bruesch is at home, recovering. In addition to the injuries that required an emergency thoracotomy, he also broke three ribs and eight vertebrae. In spite of this, he says he’s going to continue bull riding.

Meanwhile, in Pocatello, there’s a trauma surgeon shopping for a wheelbarrow to carry his giant brass testicles.

Posted in Geek, Mammals | Comments Closed

Short memo from the police beat.

June 14th, 2018

After 18 months, countless hours of debate, and several public meetings (one of which interfered with the Austin Citizen’s Police Academy graduation, not that I’m BITTER or anything), the Austin Police Department finally has a non-interim chief…

…Punch Rockgroin! Brian Manley.

As I’ve said before, he seems to me to be a good guy with a truly macho name and a good leader with local ties. We’ll have to see how his tenure plays out, but I am cautiously optimistic.

In other news, the felony perjury and misdemeanor official misconduct charges against Joel Abelove, the district attorney of Rensselaer County (in upstate New York) have been dropped.

I would have sworn I wrote about this at the time, but apparently I didn’t. It’s rare to see a sitting DA charged with a crime, and the backstory is interesting.

In April of 2016, a man named Edson Thevenin was stopped by police in Troy on “suspicion of drunk driving”. The stop escalated, there was a “brief chase”, and somewhere in there a police officer became pinned between his cruiser and Mr. Thevenin’s car: Mr. Thevenin was shot eight times and killed.

After the shooting, Mr. Abelove, a Republican, quickly convened a grand jury, something that the attorney general’s office believed was intentionally meant to ensure that the officer, Sgt. Randall French, did not get charged in the killing. Mr. Abelove had also conferred immunity on Sergeant French before the grand jury voted, Mr. Schneiderman’s office said, and was alleged to have lied to a separate grand jury about another immunity case.

I can see two ways of spinning this: former AG and known abuser Schneiderman was peeved that the state couldn’t go after a cop who was involved in a shooting, and tried to take it out on the DA instead. Or: Abelove was trying to manipulate the grand jury system and cover for a cop in a bad shooting.

Mr. Schneiderman, a Democrat who resigned in disgrace last month after allegations that he had physically abused romantic partners, was empowered to investigate Mr. Abelove under a 2015 executive order from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. The order allowed the state attorney general to serve as a special prosecutor for investigations into the deaths of “unarmed civilians caused by law enforcement officers.”
In the case of Mr. Thevenin, Mr. Cuomo issued a second executive order that allowed Mr. Schneiderman to specifically examine Mr. Abelove’s handling of the investigation, including “its grand jury presentation.”

What led to the decision to drop the charges?

Justice Jonathan D. Nichols questioned the scope of the authority included in the Thevenin executive order and ruled that the attorney general’s office “was without jurisdiction and hence unauthorized to appear in front of the grand jury,” in relation to the perjury charge.
“The court finds the integrity of the grand jury was impaired in this case,” Justice Nichols wrote. “And impaired to the extent that prejudice to the defendant is clearly possible.”

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

After action report: Reno, NV.

June 13th, 2018

Yet another excuse to post photos and links and some ramblings. I’ll put a jump here since some of the photos might take time to load…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Food, Guns, Movies, Photography, Planes, Trains, Travel | Comments Closed

Short note from the legal beat.

June 12th, 2018

Rose McGowan has been indicted in Virginia on one count of felony possession of cocaine.

Apparently, she left her wallet on an airline flight in January of 2017: when it was found, there were two “baggies” of coke inside.

Ms. McGowan’s defense: there weren’t any drugs in her wallet when she saw it last, and she thinks the drugs were planted by…

…wait for it…

…Harvey Weinstein.

I usually don’t buy the “b—h set me up” (or “b—–d set me up”) defense. And I’m unlikely to be called to sit on a jury in Virginia. And if I were called, I would listen to both sides of the case, and try to render a fair judgement based on the facts.

But: given that this is Harvey Weinstein we’re talking about, I’m more than a little inclined to throw some reasonable doubt Ms. McGowan’s way.

Posted in Law, Movies | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 12, 2018.

June 12th, 2018

Eunice Gayson. You may not recognize the name, but you may recognize the face: she was “Sylvia Trench” in “Dr. No”, the very first Bond girl.

After appearing in the Bond films, she acted in television shows, among them two 1960s spy series, “The Saint” (which starred a future James Bond, Roger Moore) and “The Avengers.” She remained a fixture in London theater. Among other productions, she appeared in the comedy “The Grass Is Greener” in 1971 and, in the early ’90s, in Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” as the grandmother.

…

In 1953, she married the producer and journalist Leigh Vance on the CBS television show “Bride and Groom,” sponsored by Betty Crocker. The couple were flown to New York for the wedding, and it was chronicled in London’s newspapers. Critics, though, panned the show. The wedding was described in Billboard magazine as an example of bad taste that could “end the British way of life.” The couple divorced in 1959.

I’ve been holding on to this one for a couple of days, because I wasn’t sure if I could note it without coming across as a jerk.

Charlotte Fox passed away on May 24th. She was a mountain climber: she was the first woman to summit Gasherbrum II and Cho Oyu, both over 26,000 feet high.

She also summited Everest, making her the first woman to summit three mountains over 26,000 feet high. More interesting: her Everest summit attempt was during the 1996 expedition chronicled in Into Thin Air.

She was descending from the summit when a rogue storm swept across the mountain with wind chills of 100 degrees below zero. The blizzard, which lasted for hours, had killed eight climbers from four expeditions. Ms. Fox nearly froze to death, but she and others were rescued and evacuated by helicopter.

…

“My eyes were frozen,” she was quoted as saying in “Into Thin Air.” “I didn’t see how we were going to get out of it alive.”
“I didn’t think I could endure it anymore,” she added. “I just curled up in a ball and hoped death would come quickly.”

She survived a husband and a boyfriend: one was killed in an avalanche, and the other in a paragliding crash.

I think the death of any survivor of the 1996 expedition would be worthy of note. But this is the part that makes me afraid of sounding like a jerk: Ms. Fox died apparently as a result of a fall in her home.

Returning from dinner, weekend guests discovered her body at the bottom of a 77-step hardwood staircase connecting the four stories of her house on Tomboy Road, which undulates along a mountainside. Her front door is on the top floor.

I guess this is just another reminder that tomorrow is not promised to anyone.

By the way, the paper of record, as far as I can tell, still has not published an obit for Gardner Dozois.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

I lit out from Reno…

June 11th, 2018

Travel day today. Early morning flight, long layover in Denver, so I may have a chance to blog.

If I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight.

Talk amongst yourselves.

Posted in Travel | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 8, 2018.

June 8th, 2018

Anthony Bourdain.

I don’t remember now what prompted me to pick up Kitchen Confidential, but I’m glad I did: it was a wild, fun, and funny book that I enjoyed immensely. I think at this point I’ve read almost everything Mr. Bourdain wrote that was bound between covers. I wasn’t as up on his TV shows, what with the whole not having cable thing. And I really wanted to meet him sometime when he wasn’t frantically searching for a bathroom in an airport and say thanks.

I had been reading Appetites: A Cookbook right before I left, and I remember him talking about how much he loved his family and friends, and cooking for them. That was pretty much the whole point of the book: cooking well for the people you love. I guess I sort of half-consciously knew that he went through a divorce after that…

Bethany Mandel wrote a good piece for the NYPost the other day about suicide and what it does to the people left behind. I commend it to your attention, especially the last paragraph.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Posted in Books, Food, Obits, Travel, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 7, 2018.

June 7th, 2018

Jerry Maren, one of the Munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz” and the last surviving little person from that group. (According to the NYT, some young girls were also hired to fill out the Munchkin ranks, and some of them are still alive.)

With a friend and fellow actor, Billy Barty, Mr. Maren in 1957 founded Little People of America, a nonprofit advocacy organization that says it has roughly 6,000 members.
“He took it as his responsibility to show, through a strong sense of self and speaking out and personal example, that little people are just people,” Mr. Cox said. “All of the other Munchkins had a great deal of respect for Jerry.”

Mel Weinberg, of ABSCAM fame.

A convicted swindler with a Runyonesque persona, Mr. Weinberg, facing prison for fraud, traded his criminal savvy for probation and became a principal orchestrator and actor in the two-year operation code-named Abscam. The operation videotaped politicians and others taking bribes from federal agents posing as oil-rich Arabs seeking favors on immigration problems and investment projects.

…

With chartered jets, limousines and parties to lend verisimilitude, the government-run scam led to convictions and prison terms for Senator Harrison A. Williams, a New Jersey Democrat, as well as the mayor of Camden, N.J., and 17 others. It inspired a revision of guidelines in federal undercover cases and legal and ethical debates over whether the defendants had been unlawfully entrapped.

Posted in FBI, Law, Movies, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Travel day.

June 6th, 2018

Blogging will be catch-as-catch-can, especially since the latest update to the WordPress app on IOS appears to have broken either the app or the connection between the app and my blog.

Talk among yourselves. I’ll start: the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman, nor an Empire. Discuss.

Okay, slightly more seriously: I’m about halfway through Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence and expect to finish it on the plane tomorrow. I’m liking it a lot, though not quite as much as Public Enemies or The Big Rich.

The most striking thing to me: just how many bathrooms the Weathermen blew up. There are parts of the book that are just a litany of “blew up a men’s room”, “blew up a ladies room”, “destroyed a bathroom”, “blew up a bathroom in the Pentagon”. It’s like these people didn’t do anything except blow up bathrooms (and, of course, themselves).

The whole book is a veritable catalog of certified bat guano insanity. And I haven’t even gotten to the part about the guy with one eye and one thumb (he lost the other eye and nine fingers when his homemade bomb detonated prematurely) who escaped from jail by cutting the metal grate out of his window (ever tried using wire cutters with no fingers and one thumb?) and dropping 40 feet…

Posted in Books, Law, Travel | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 5, 2018.

June 5th, 2018

Prominent fashion designer Kate Spade has passed away at 55.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Robert Mandan, television actor perhaps most famous as “Chester Tate” on “Soap”.

Barbara Kafka, noted cookbook author. When I was younger, I cooked a lot of meals out of her Microwave Gourmet.

For the record, the paper of same still has not published an obit for Gardner Dozois.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Food, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Historical note, suitable for use in schools.

June 4th, 2018

Approximately 50 years ago today*, Robert F. Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just won the Democratic primary in California.

LAT retrospective. Steve Lopez column.

In case you were wondering, Sirhan is still alive, still in prison, and his next parole hearing will be in 2021.

I wish I could say more about this: I was barely three at the time.

* Technically, the shooting took place in the early morning of June 5th.

Posted in History, Politics | Comments Closed

If you like your revolver, you can keep your revolver.

June 1st, 2018

The New York Police Department is getting rid of their revolvers.

“What’s that?” you say. “I thought the NYPD all carried Glocks or SIG with the NY-2 trigger.”

Mostly right you are, Bob, and you’re also a perceptive reader of my blog. But NYPD grandfathered in officers who chose to continue carrying revolvers after the department transitioned to semi-auto pistols in 1993. Yes, there are NYPD officers still on the job, still carrying revolvers, after 25 years.

More than 2,000 city police officers still held on to the revolvers over a decade after Sig Sauer and Glock pistols became standard. Their numbers dwindled with each wave of retirements, to 160 by the time the Police Department announced in November that it was phasing out revolvers completely and permanently.

The paper of record estimates that “about 50 officers” are still carrying revolvers. The department decided in November that everyone would transition to semi-auto pistols by the end of August.

“After this class, the days of seeing a police officer out there carrying a swivel holster or a .38 holster with a .38 in there are basically nonexistent,” Inspector Richard G. DiBlasio, the commanding officer of the Firearms and Tactics Section, said. “It’s tradition and some people don’t want to let go of it, but tactics is always number one.”

…

But the change has been met with resistance from officers reluctant to set aside the revolvers that they regard as old friends for unfamiliar pistols that have twice the capacity but are susceptible to jamming. Officer Mary Lawrence, a crime prevention officer in the 103rd precinct in Queens, said that was never a concern with the Smith & Wesson revolver that she has used over her 26 years with the department.
“I’m proud of this uniform that I’m wearing and I’m proud of my gun that I carry because it’s been reliable to me,” she said. “I didn’t think that I needed extra firepower at all.”

The Firearm Blog actually covered this when the announcement was made in November, but I’m blogging the NYT story here because I think it’s an interesting piece of “human interest” journalism (hysteria about “increasing gun violence” aside). Especially that photo at the top of the article.

I wish someone could ask Jim Cirillo if he would feel undergunned with his Model 10 today, and if he thinks “gun violence” has increased since the early 1970s. (Also, I hope someone picks up the reprint rights to Guns, Bullets, and Gunfights now that Paladin is out of business.)

Posted in Books, Cops, Guns, NYPD | Comments Closed

Overthinking it.

May 31st, 2018

Headline:

Please Don’t Roast Marshmallows Over the Erupting Hawaii Volcano, USGS Warns

At first, this sounds like a bunch of joyless fun suckers sucking all the fun out of life. But USGS’s argument actually makes sense: the H2S and SO2 present around a volcanic eruption would probably make the marshmallows taste bad.

But the idea of using something other than an open campfire to toast marshmallows has a certain appeal. What you want in the ideal toasted marshmallow is for it to be evenly browned, not burned. You’re looking for that perfect Maillard reaction all over the marshmallow. And that’s really hard to get in a campfire context.

So why not use an indirect heat source? Could you use something like a heat lamp or some sort of radiant heater to toast marshmallows, instead of radiated heat from hot molten rocks? Why not? Even better, what if your marshmallow toasting stick had a motor in it? Just some sort of small battery powered one that, when you pushed a button, rotated the marshmallow at a uniform speed over the indirect heat source until it was evenly browned.

I thought I’d check Amazon and…well…I found this, which instantly turned me off the whole idea. I’m not sure why: maybe the whole idea of a dedicated electric S’mores maker just seems antithetical to the whole idea of S’mores.

Maybe part of the appeal of a toasted marshmallow isn’t just the striving for an even Maillard reaction, but also the added flavors of wood smoke and the great outdoors.

Or, maybe, I’m just overthinking it.

(But I strongly encourage at least one of my readers to purchase this and report back on the contents.)

Posted in Food, Geek | 2 Comments »

Historical note.

May 31st, 2018

Today is the fifth anniversary of the Southwest Inn fire in Houston.

Looking back over the blog, I didn’t write much about it at the time because I was running around a lot. I did touch on it a few years later.

The Houston Fire Department responded to a fire at a restaurant that was connected to the hotel. It blew up into a major conflagration, and while HFD was trying to put out the fire, the roof collapsed.

Four firefighters were killed instantly: Engineer Operator Robert Bebee, Firefighter Robert Garner, Captain Mathew Renaud, and Firefighter Anne Sullivan. HFD Captain William Dowling sustained serious injuries, and passed away in 2017.

Summary and lessons learned from FireRescue.

NIOSH report on the fire.

Posted in History | Comments Closed

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