I’m going to be on airplanes pretty much all day.
Blogging will be catch as catch can until Tuesday of next week.
Travel day.
June 10th, 2025Obit watch: June 9, 2025.
June 9th, 2025Lieutenant Commander Conrad Shinn (US Navy – ret.) died on May 15th. He was 102.
LTC Shinn was the first man to land a plane at the South Pole.
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On Oct. 31, 1956, Commander Shinn, Admiral Dufek and five other Navy men made the seven-hour flight from McMurdo Station on Antarctica to the pole aboard an R4D-5L Skytrain, a twin-engine military version of the commercial DC-3. Internal politics affected the assigned duties for the extraordinary mission.
A captain onboard, Douglas Cordiner, was so upset at not being named the co-pilot that he later stood on the deck of a ship in New Zealand and “threw his library of Antarctica into the water,” Commander Shinn said in his oral history interview.
The R4D, nicknamed Que Sera Sera — Whatever Will Be Will Be — after a popular song, had its landing gear outfitted with skis and was accompanied by a circling Air Force C-124 Globemaster cargo aircraft. Maurice Cutler, then an 18-year-old United Press correspondent from Australia who joined other reporters on the cargo plane, which had wheels but no skis, said in an interview that pallets of survival gear were to be airdropped if Commander Shinn’s plane could not lift off from the pole.
The landing, photographed from above by Mr. Cutler, was not exceptionally rough. Commander Shinn set his plane down at 8:34 p.m. during continuous sunlight across windblown ridges on a desolate ice sheet nearly 10,000 feet above sea level. The temperature was minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit.
Admiral Dufek planted an American flag, and Commander Shinn kept the engines running as the plane remained on the ground for 49 minutes. By then, the skis had become stuck to the ice.
In the thin air on the ice cap, the propeller-driven plane, weighing 28,000 pounds, did not budge with its engines at full power. “We just sat on the ice like an old mud hen,” Commander Shinn told the National Naval Aviation Museum.
To gain thrust, Commander Shinn made a jet-assisted takeoff, firing a series of small rockets housed in canisters attached to the fuselage. After all 15 rockets had been fired, the plane lifted off. “Barely,” he said in a radio interview a day or so after the flight.
Tom Henderson, who directed the 2019 documentary “Ice Eagles,” about aviation in Antarctica, said in a recent interview that Commander Shinn had told him he had lifted off at 58 miles an hour, two below the plane’s minimum designated takeoff speed.
Later, an engine oil pressure light came on, Mr. Henderson said, and Commander Shinn promptly unscrewed the bulb, telling his co-pilot that he’d rather not have Admiral Dufek “see that and get excited.”
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Frederick Forsyth. The obits right now are still in the preliminary stage, but I’m going to be on the road tomorrow and don’t know when I’ll have time to write.
I wrote a long time ago about my early experience with The Day of the Jackel. I also wrote a little, not quite so long ago, about The Shepherd.
I remember thinking The Odessa File was pretty good, but I was young at the time. I’m not sure it holds up. I do think The Dogs of War does.
Oddly, I think my second favorite Forsyth (of the ones I’ve read) is the short story collection No Comebacks. A story that turns on an obscure point of libel law? Another story about a man who figures out a way to take his fortune with him when he dies…and tick off his greedy family. A group of blackmailers meet their match in a meek insurance executive.
And then there’s “The Emperor”. This seems like a typical fishing story of the kind Hemingway would have written: man gets into the fight of his life with a big fish. But the man is a henpecked bank employee…and in the struggle with the fish, he finds something inside him. This story contains another of my favorite lines in fiction:
“To hell with the bank,” he said at length. “To hell with Ponder’s End. And madam, to hell with you.”
Bill Atkinson, one of the pioneers of the Macintosh.
It was Mr. Atkinson who programmed QuickDraw, a foundational software layer used for both the Lisa and Macintosh computers; composed of a library of small programs, it made it possible to display shapes, text and images on the screen efficiently.
The QuickDraw programs were embedded in the computers’ hardware, providing a distinctive graphical user interface that presented a simulated “desktop,” displaying icons of folders, files and application programs.
Mr. Atkinson is credited with inventing many of the key aspects of graphical computing, such as “pull down” menus and the “double-click” gesture, which allows users to open files, folders and applications by clicking a mouse button twice in succession.
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Mr. Atkinson’s programming feats were renowned in Silicon Valley.
“Looking at his code was like looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” recalled Steve Perlman, who as a young Apple hardware engineer took advantage of Mr. Atkinson’s software to design the first color Macintosh. “His code was remarkable. It is what made the Macintosh possible.”
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He was also the author of two of the most significant early programs written for the Macintosh. One, MacPaint, was a digital drawing program that came with the original Macintosh; it made it possible for a user to create and manipulate images on the screen, controlling everything down to the level of the individual display pixel.
Ordinary users without specialized skills could now create drawings, illustrations and designs directly on a computer screen. The program introduced the concept of a “tool palette,” a set of clickable icons to select simulated paint brushes pens, and pencils.
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Obit watch: June 8, 2025.
June 8th, 2025Some people might quibble about notability. But I think there’s an interesting story here, though not the one some people want to tell.
Ms. Jacobs spent nearly 17 years in prison in Florida, five of them on death row, for the murders of two law enforcement officers in February 1976 at a rest stop near Fort Lauderdale.
Her boyfriend at the time, Jesse Tafero, a petty criminal who had been convicted of attempted rape, was also convicted of murder. He was executed by electric chair in Florida in a notoriously botched procedure in May 1990. It took seven minutes and three jolts, and his head caught on fire.
Ms. Jacobs, whose death sentence was overturned in 1982, was ultimately freed a decade later, when a federal appeals court found that prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence from the defense. She took a plea deal rather than face retrial and was never legally exonerated.
It was this story that formed the basis of Ms. Jacobs’s subsequent, celebrated tale — that she had been an innocent, a “28-year-old vegetarian hippie,” as she told The New York Times in a 2011 Vows article about her marriage to a fellow former inmate, the Irishman Peter Pringle, who died in 2023.
A product of a prosperous Long Island family, Ms. Jacobs said she had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, as had Mr. Tafero, when the killings took place. Responsibility for them, she said, lay with another passenger in the car, Walter Rhodes, who had also been convicted of petty crimes and who later confessed to the killings of the two officers (though he subsequently recanted, confessed and recanted again, multiple times).
Ms. Jacobs became a cause célèbre. There was an off-Broadway play, “The Exonerated” (which actually deals with six people, not just Ms. Jacobs) that was turned into a TV movie. There was also another TV movie that I think focuses on Ms. Jacobs, though information is hard to find.
Except…there’s more to the story.
A young former reporter, Ellen McGarrahan, who had witnessed Mr. Tafero’s execution for The Miami Herald and was haunted by it, spent much of the next 30 years digging into what had actually happened that day at the rest stop. She published her findings in a well-received 2021 book, “Two Truths and a Lie.”
Ms. McGarrahan’s meticulous, incisive research — she left journalism to become a professional private investigator after witnessing the execution — contradicts Ms. Jacobs’s story on almost every point.
Ms. Jacobs, Mr. Tafero and Mr. Rhodes existed in a murky underworld of violence, drug dealing, gun infatuation and petty crime, Ms. McGarrahan found.
By the time of the fatal encounter with the Florida state trooper Phillip Black and his visiting friend, the Canadian constable Donald Irwin, Ms. Jacobs’s charge sheet was already long: arrests for prostitution, forgery, illegal gun possession, contributing to the delinquency of a minor (her then-4-year-old son, Eric), and drug dealing.
After the killings, a loaded handgun was found in her purse. Several weapons — two 9-millimeter semiautomatic handguns, a .38-caliber Special revolver, a .22-caliber Derringer, a .32-caliber revolver — were found in the various cars linked to Mr. Tafero and Mr. Rhodes, Ms. McGarrahan wrote.
Two eyewitnesses, truckers who were at the scene of the killings, said in court testimony that Mr. Rhodes couldn’t have been the shooter because they saw that his hands were in the air. Forensic evidence suggested that a Taser shot, setting off the volley of fatal gunfire between the two parties, came from the back of the car, where Ms. Jacobs was sitting with her children.
Ms. McGarrahan posits that Ms. Jacobs may have at least fired the Taser, which she had purchased months earlier.
“The state’s theory was that Sunny fired the Taser and the gun at Trooper Black while he was attempting to subdue Jesse,” Ms. McGarrahan wrote, and that “Jesse grabbed the gun from Sunny and continued firing at both Trooper Black and Constable Irwin.”
According to a Florida Supreme Court opinion in the case, as Ms. Jacobs was being led away after her arrest, a Florida state trooper asked her, “Do you like shooting troopers?”
Ms. Jacobs was reported to have responded, “We had to.”
I haven’t read Two Truths and a Lie, but a copy is on the way from the ‘Zon.
Ms. McGarrahan, reflecting on the saga that she had spent so many years uncovering, said in an interview that with Ms. Jacobs, “the myth has become the truth.”
“She made herself into the victim,” Ms. McGarrahan added. “It removes the actual victims.”
Officer Down memorial page for Trooper Phillip A. Black. Ontario Police Memorial Foundation page for Corporal Donald R. Irwin.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#148 in a series)
June 6th, 2025Marcos Lopez is the sheriff of Osceola County in Florida, though he is currently suspended.
Why is he suspended? Because he was indicted on racketeering and “conspiracy to commit racketeering” charges on Thursday.
NYT:
The charges stem from a joint investigation conducted in 2023 by Homeland Security Investigations and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The inquiry uncovered a criminal syndicate that prosecutors say operated an illegal gambling network that generated about $22 million across Central Florida, especially in Lake and Osceola Counties.
Prosecutors said that Sheriff Lopez’s ties to the casino, the Eclipse Social Club in Kissimmee, Fla., date to 2019, a year before his election. After becoming sheriff in 2020, prosecutors said, he continued to protect the gambling ring as it expanded in Florida while collecting a portion of proceeds.
Prosecutors said that Sheriff Lopez’s involvement in the gambling enterprise continued until as recently as August 2024, months before he was re-elected in November.
Switching back to the Tampa Bay Times:
Zero Stars.
June 6th, 2025Pete DeBoer out as head coach of the Dallas Stars.
(Sorry for the straight-up ESPN link, but the Dallas papers are pretty much unlinkable.)
Obit watch: June 6, 2025.
June 6th, 2025Mara Corday, actress. I have not seen a THR obit for her, and the paper of records says she died on February 9th:
Other credits include “Peter Gunn”, “Naked Gun” (1956), and “Francis Joins the WACS”.
It is mentioned in the subhead, but Clint Eastwood’s 95th birthday was this past weekend, and they don’t show the video, so…
(Fun fact: according to IMDB, “Go ahead, make my day.” was contributed by Charles B. Pierce, who is credited as one of the writers. That’s Charles B. Pierce of “The Legend of Boggy Creek” and “Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues”.)
(No, the Saturday Movie Group didn’t watch “Sudden Impact” this past weekend. We watched “The Enforcer” because that was the next movie in our Dirty Harry rotation. I am looking forward to watching “Sudden Impact”, though, because I haven’t seen that since it was in theaters.)
Obit watch: June 3, 2025.
June 3rd, 2025Shigeo Nagashima, one of the great Japanese baseball players.
Along with his teammate Sadaharu Oh, Japan’s home run king, Nagashima was the centerpiece of the country’s most enduring sports dynasty. He hit 444 home runs, had a lifetime batting average of .305, won six batting titles and five times led the league in runs batted in. He was a five-time most valuable player and was chosen as the league’s top third baseman in each of his 17 seasons. He was inducted into Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame in 1988.
In his first season, 1958, he led the league in home runs and was second in stolen bases and batting average, earning him rookie of the year honors. And then, early in his second season, he made history in the first game attended by a Japanese emperor, Hirohito, and an empress, Nagako. In the bottom of the ninth inning, Nagashima hit a 2-2 pitch into the left field stands for a game-winning home run, considered one of the most dramatic sports events in Japanese history.
One of Nagashima’s trademarks was his work ethic, a character trait that was particularly celebrated during Japan’s postwar rise. Under the guidance of manager Tetsuharu Kawakami, Nagashima practiced from dawn to dusk, enduring an infamous 1,000-fungo drill that required him to field ground ball after ground ball. In the off-season, he trained in the mountains, running and swinging the bat to the point of exhaustion. He bought a house by the Tama River in Tokyo so he could run there, and he added a room to his home where he could practice swinging.
Jim Marshall, defensive end for the Minnesota Vikings.
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Marshall gained a permanent place in NFL Films lore in 1964 when he returned a fumble the wrong way in a game against the San Francisco 49ers, celebrating what he thought was a touchdown but instead was scored a safety. But his career accomplishments far outweighed that gaffe.
He was a Vikings captain for 14 seasons and appeared in four Super Bowls as part of the franchise’s famed Purple People Eaters defense. Although sacks did not become an official statistic until 1982, a research project coordinated by Pro Football Reference credited him with 130.5, which would tie him for No. 22 in NFL history.
Knick knack paddy whack…
June 3rd, 2025This is still breaking news, but: The New York Knickerbockers just fired head coach Tom Thibodeau.
In five seasons with the Knicks, Thibodeau led them to a 226-174 regular-season record, and they made the playoffs in four of his five seasons at the helm.
When it came to the postseason, however, a 24-23 mark with the Knicks didn’t cut it.
ESPN.
Obit watch: May 31, 2025.
May 31st, 2025
I would like to think she ended up with piles and piles of sweet “M*A*S*H” residuals, especially given how long she was on the show. But there’s a quote in Larry Linville’s IMDB entry:
Then again, she only had one ex-husband.
I have a lot of problems with “M*A*S*H”, and those problems only increase the more MeTV reruns it. But it is interesting that Major Houlihan was actually permitted to have a character arc. This is a nice moment. (It used to be on YouTube, but I think they’re scrubbing anything from “M*A*S*H” that isn’t official.)
Other credits include “Freebie and the Bean”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “Mission: Impossible”, “Supertrain”…
…and she was a “Mannix” two-timer. (“Only One Death to a Customer“, season 3, episode 20. She was “Dorothy Harker”. “Figures in a Landscape“, season 4, episode 4. She was “Jill Packard”.)
Obit watch: May 30, 2025.
May 30th, 2025Bernard B. Kerik, former commissioner of the New York Police Department.
He was in charge on September 11th.
He was also convicted of several crimes, including tax fraud, and served three years of a four year federal sentence. He was pardoned by Trump in 2020.
NYT obit for Harrison Ruffin Tyler (share link). Previously.
Dr. Robert Jarvik, the artificial heart guy.
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In January 1990, the Food and Drug Administration withdrew its approval of the Jarvik-7, citing concerns about the manufacturer’s quality control.
In a 1989 interview with Syracuse University Magazine, Dr. Jarvik admitted that his belief that the Jarvik-7 was advanced enough to be used widely on a permanent basis was “probably the biggest mistake I have ever made.”
Still, he defended his work. Of the five recipients of the permanent Jarvik-7, he told the magazine, “These were people who I view as having had their lives prolonged,” adding that they survived nine months on average when some had been expected to live “no more than a week.”
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In the late 1980s, his company, Jarvik Heart Inc., began developing smaller, less obtrusive implements, known as ventricular assist devices. Unlike the Jarvik-7, these devices do not replace a diseased heart but assist in pumping blood from the lower chambers of the heart to the rest of the body. One such device, the Jarvik 2000, is about the size of a C battery. A pediatric version, called the Jarvik 2015, is roughly the size of an AA battery.
According to a 2023 study of the artificial heart market, a descendant of the original Jarvik-7, now owned by another company, is called the SynCardia Total Artificial Heart. It is designed primarily for temporary use in patients who face imminent death while awaiting transplants. The study found that the device had been implanted in more than 1,700 patients worldwide.
Springtime!
May 29th, 2025And I’d like to talk about Spring…fields. Or at least books about Springfields. Plus some sniping content after the jump…
Obit watch: May 29, 2025.
May 29th, 2025FotB Joe D pointed out in comments the death of Harrison Ruffin Tyler at the age of 96.
He was the grandson of president John Tyler. It is actually a kind of interesting story: he was born to Lyon Gardiner Tyler, John’s son. Lyon was 75 when he was born. John Tyler was 63 when Lyon was born.
Bruce Logan, who did a lot of movie special effects. Among his credits: he blew up the Death Star.
Mr. Logan — who was also a cinematographer and director — recalled that he could not film the Death Star’s detonation as if it were happening on Earth.
“When you shoot an explosion conventionally, with the camera straight and level, with forces of gravity and atmospherics acting on it, what you get is a mushroom cloud which doesn’t look like it’s exploding in outer space,” he wrote on Zacuto.com, a film equipment website, in 2015.
To achieve the needed effect, Mr. Logan manned a high-speed camera, which was surrounded by a sheet of plywood, with a hole cut out for the lens and a sheet of glass covering it. With the camera pointed upward, Joe Viskocil, a pyrotechnics specialist, set off a series of miniature bombs overhead, which created the illusion of the explosions occurring in zero gravity in outer space.
The bombs’ ingredients included black powder, gasoline, titanium chips and napalm — and the only protection the crew had was a grip holding a fire extinguisher.
“I do remember wiping some burning napalm off my arm,” Mr. Logan told the Manhattan Edit Workshop, a postproduction school, in 2019.
Ed Gale, actor. Other credits include “Chopper Chicks in Zombietown”, “Land of the Lost”, and “Phantasm II”.
Peter Kwong, actor. Other credits include “Theodore Rex”, “Homeboys in Outer Space”, and “Renegade”.
(Hattip on the last two to Lawrence.)