…Pope Leo just dropped his first encyclical! And it is relevant to our interests!
“Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding The Human Person In The Time Of Artificial Intelligence”.
Reminds me of a quote I rather like, and use from time to time at work:
“If you have a routine, you can always deviate from it if something comes up. But if you don’t have a routine, then everything is stuff that comes up.”
–Don Winslow, The Winter of Frankie Machine
I got nothing. I’ve been busy, occupied with personal issues, and a little under the weather, and didn’t have time to put together a good (or even decent) post.
So instead, I’m going to point you at a documentary that’s about 30 minutes long: “No Greater Love”.
This covers the four Catholic chaplains who received the Medal of Honor, and who I have written about previously:
Fr. Joseph O’Callahan
Fr. Emil Kapaun
Fr. Vincent Capodanno
Fr. Charles Watters
The archiving service I use has been having problems for the past few days, and I’m running low on NYT share links.
Kyle Busch. ESPN. Oddly, I don’t see any coverage of this in the NYT: it looks like they’ve shuffled off the coverage to their sports vertical, “The Athletic”, which they make you pay extra to read.
41 seems awfully young these days.
Edited to add: Shortly after this went up, the NYT posted an actual obit in the obituary section. I apologize that this is paywalled, but, as I said earlier, archive.is is having problems and I only have three share links left until June 1. (No, they don’t roll over from month to month. I wish.)
Kirk Foyle. He was a local man: Tuesday night, he was eating on the patio at Green Mesquite (one of our local barbecue restaurants), when a tree fell on him. He died from his injuries the next day.
Tomorrow is promised to nobody, whether you’re a NASCAR driver or a barbecue eater. Be prepared.
Sam Sianis. He owned and ran the Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago, also known as the “Cheezborger cheezborger cheezborger cheeps cheeps Pepsi!” place from SNL. (Though my understanding is that sketch was also heavily influenced by the Belushi family, who were in the restaurant business as well.)
The Billy Goat Tavern is also famous for triggering Cubs fans.
Mr. Sianis’s uncle Billy bought the bar — which was originally across from Chicago Stadium (now United Center) and called the Lincoln Tavern — in 1934. After a goat wandered in the door, he renamed the bar the Billy Goat and adopted the animal as a pet.
The goat, called Murphy, became something of a celebrity himself. In 1945, the elder Mr. Sianis brought him to Game 4 of the World Series, between the Cubs and the Detroit Tigers, at Wrigley Field.
It began to rain. Murphy began to stink. The Cubs’ owner, Philip K. Wrigley, kicked them out.
As he was leaving, Billy Sianis put a curse on the team, vowing that it would never win a championship. When the Cubs lost the Series that year, he sent a note to Mr. Wrigley: “Now who stinks!”
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In 1984, when the Cubs were contesting the National League championship, the team relented and allowed Mr. Sianis bring a goat onto the field.
But the Cubs did not win a World Series until 2016.
Watching the tiebreaking seventh game that year from the tavern, Mr. Sianis banished the curse by ringing the bell that had been worn by Murphy in 1945. The current goat stood beside him, looking as nervous as the rest of the crowd. Then it urinated on the floor. Mr. Sianis led it away.
“Don’t touch the goat,” one fan said, according to The Financial Times. “It’s bad luck.”
“Then it urinated on the floor.” I cannot tell a lie: one of the reasons I enjoy NYT obits so much is the telling details.
I’m a little behind, and, to be honest, not feeling great. But Lawrence would give me a hard time if I failed to note that the Dallas Mavericks fired Jason Kidd.
Five seasons, 205-205 overall.
Sorry for the lazy ESPN link, but, as I’ve noted before, the Dallas media is all but unlinkable.
The Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas.
The restaurant blamed major casinos and “corporate greed” for pricing average Americans out of the “quintessential American experience of affordable indulgence” in Las Vegas, it said.
“Our core value, ‘Eat big and laugh loud,’ no longer fits a city peddling $40 ‘artisanal avocado toast,’” the restaurant said.
“The honest, heavy-duty calories that built our reputation are now considered gauche by a city that has excluded the middle class and lost its swagger in the process.”
Lawrence sent over a report from Fox Las Vegas:
This is a couple of days old, but worth noting: G. Robert Blakey.
He did the RICO.
In 1969, he was hired as the chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures. It was there that he worked on the RICO law, under Senator John L. McClellan, the Arkansas Democrat who chaired the subcommittee.
The law — Title IX of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, for which Senator McClellan was the driving force — says that a person or group of people who commit certain crimes as part of a conspiracy or criminal enterprise can be charged with racketeering. And it allows those hurt by the enterprise to sue for three times their actual damages.
Previously, prosecutors would charge people for committing single crimes like murder, extortion or gambling, or for conspiracy to commit those individual felonies. “Bob took conspiracy law and broadened it to describe a pattern of racketeering that is committed in furtherance of an enterprise,” Ed Stier, a former federal prosecutor in New Jersey, said in an interview.
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Some critics have argued that the RICO law is too vague, that it is too widely used and that its penalties are sometimes out of proportion to the crimes being prosecuted.
“It is sort of the white-collar equivalent of capital punishment,” Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, told The Los Angeles Times in 1989 after the conviction of a New Jersey investment partnership for engaging in a racketeering conspiracy involving securities fraud.
Peter G. Neumann, computer security guru and a hero of mine.
Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man), who has worked as a computer scientist and security researcher at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., since 1971, has long been a voice in the wilderness warning about a computer industry that has been prone to repeatedly make the same mistakes.
In 2010, Dr. Neumann launched a research project that investigated how to protect against the most common types of security vulnerabilities. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the program, known as Cheri, developed a new approach to computer hardware that restricts software programs so that malicious instructions are impossible to execute.
An analogy would be replacing a master key that opens every door in a building with a set of keys that each only open the specific rooms their holder is authorized to enter — and making it physically impossible to copy or modify them.
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Beginning in 1985, Dr. Neumann served as editor for the Association for Computing Machinery Risks Forum newsgroup, an influential collection of emails from readers reporting computer failures and foibles that has an avid following of hundreds of thousands.
Since then, he has maintained the sprawling compendium of computer failures, flaws, foibles and privacy issues, annotating each of the 3,195 issues with wry comments and the occasional pun. In 1995, the list became the basis for his book, “Computer-Related Risks.”
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I’m not much of a beer drinker, but this gives me a chance to embed my favorite Sven and Ole joke.
It would be impossible for me to care any less than I already do not care about Taylor Swift.
I’m not a big Beyoncé fan, either, though my opinion of her isn’t quite at the Swift level.
With that out of the way, some random thoughts about the other 23 new inductees to the National Recording Registry:
It has been more than a minute since I’ve been scuba diving.
And my dive certification came from PADI (which, as we all know, stands for “Put Another Diver In”).
But these people were cave diving?
At 160 feet?
The fark?
I know, it is early, the investigation isn’t complete, and this is the NYPost. But right now, this sounds to me like criminal negligence.
Joe Sedelmaier, commercial director.
Among his works:
And this one:
And this one:
I can’t embed it, but here’s a link to his Southern Airways “Steerage” commercial. For some reason, that commercial reminds me of…every Southwest flight I’ve been on.
Claudine Longet, actress and singer.
I’ve heard this is actually a pretty good movie, but have never seen it.
After she and Williams divorced (amicably), she took up with a skier named Vladimir “Spider” Sabich.
He died on the way to the hospital. She was criminally charged, but local law enforcement completely botched the case. She ended up being convicted of “criminally negligent homicide”.
She was given two years’ probation, fined $250 and sentenced to 30 days in jail (she was able to serve most of her sentence on weekends).
The Sabich family later filed a civil suit against Longet for $1.3 million, but the case was settled out of court. Longet agreed not to speak publicly about Sabich or the murder and to never publish a book about her life and the trial, and her career as a singer and actress was done.
@jack.hutton The Claudine Longet Ski Invitational 1976 SNL A classic. #SNL #classic #1976 —
Edited to add: I know the NYT is watching this space. Because as soon as I put up my own obit for someone, the NYT puts up theirs. Guys, let’s not fight. I’d be willing to entertain a job offer, though I would insist on working remotely.
Oh, wait, I’m sorry. That’s not the question the NYT is asking. The actual question is:
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By the early 2000s, AKs from Romanian, Bulgarian, Polish and Russian companies made up a chunk of the market. Rifles imported from Russia remained highly sought after, especially after the Clinton administration’s assault weapons ban expired in 2004. The U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also bolstered the gun’s popularity, as returning service members often favored AKs because of their prevalence in their own combat experiences.
That changed in 2014 with Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and its proxy war in eastern Ukraine. The U.S. sanctions on Russian companies that followed effectively banned Russian AKs on the U.S. civilian market.
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Another one of those stories of purely local interest, as a friend of the blog likes to say:
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Betty Broderick passed away last week. She was 78.
Some folks may remember this from the late 1980s. Ms. Broderick’s husband dumped her for a younger woman.
On Nov. 5, 1989, Ms. Broderick entered the home of her ex-husband, Daniel T. Broderick III, a prominent malpractice lawyer in San Diego, and Linda Kolkena Broderick, a former flight attendant who became his legal assistant and, while he was still married to Ms. Broderick, his lover, and shot them in bed with a .38-caliber pistol.
Ms. Broderick, then about to turn 42, immediately turned herself in to the police, and never denied firing the fatal shots at her former husband, 44, and his second wife, 28. But she denied committing murder, claiming in media interviews and in the courtroom to have been a victim of years of psychological abuse.
It was one of those minor sensations at the time.
Ms. Broderick spoke to magazines and newspapers before and after her trials, and twice appeared from prison on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” angrily venting about her husband.
“He went off with the bimbo at 40, driving a red Corvette — haven’t we heard this before?” she told The Los Angeles Times three weeks after the killings.
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At her first trial, mental health specialists called by both the prosecution and the defense testified that Ms. Broderick was narcissistic and histrionic. Melvin G. Goldzband, a psychiatrist who testified for the prosecution, refuted her claims of emotional abuse.
“She wanted not to be rejected,” he said, adding that she would have been angry even if her husband had agreed to an extravagant monthly support settlement.
“People extend battles because it’s the only form of the relationship that they have,” Dr. Goldzband said.
Ms. Broderick was sentenced in 1992 to the maximum possible term: 32 years to life in prison. She was twice denied parole.
Rex Reed, noted (and I kind of want to say “notorious”) movie critic.
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Eileen Wang resigned as mayor of Arcadia, California, today.
She also took a Federal plea deal.
Eileen Wang agreed with prosecutors that she worked with the People’s Republic of China to boost propaganda with a fake news website on US soil between 2020 and 2022. She was elected to Arcadia City Council in November 2022 — the city is located in the San Gabriel Valley within LA County.
Wang, 58, worked with her then fiancé, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, on a web site called “U.S. News Center,” which claimed to be news source for Chinese Americans, according to court documents.
But in reality the pair were carrying out Beijing’s orders through the site.
Wang and Sun “executed directives” from the Chinese government, posting propaganda designed to boost China, all while reporting back to their masters with screenshots showing how many people viewed the stories, according to the plea agreement.
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Prosecutors in 2024 charged Sun with conspiracy and acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government.
Wang said her relationship with Sun ended that year. Her ex-lover also served as campaign manager for her City Council run. The mayor of Arcadia is drawn from the Council on a rotating basis.
Wang tried to distance herself from Sun in 2025, saying she “not responsible for the action of others,” and would not resign from the post she then held on the City Council.
Sun in February was sentenced to four years in federal prison for acting as a covert agent of the PRC.
Here’s an example:
In one case, Wang’s spymaster ordered her to post pre-written news articles, including a PRC official-written essay in the Los Angeles Times, the plea deal states.
“There is no genocide in Xinjiang; there is no such thing as ‘forced labor’ in any production activity, including cotton production. Spreading such rumor is to defame China, destroy Xinjiang’s safety and stability,” wrote Wang’s master, according to the plea agreement.
And maybe there’s not a whole lot of difference between China and Buzzfeed:
Philip Caputo, author and Vietnam vet.
The Vietnam War, which cost the lives of at least one million Vietnamese and 58,000 American service members, generated an outpouring of fictional and nonfictional books, by some reckoning more than 3,500 titles.
A few works came to be widely regarded as classics because their authors captured unflinchingly the peculiar mix of boredom and terror in combat, the ambivalence about fighting a war that often seemed pointless and unwinnable, and the disheartening malaise that followed America’s first military defeat.
The standouts include works of fiction, including Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” (1990), and nonfiction ones like Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” (1977), Ron Kovic’s “Born on the Fourth of July” (1976) and Mr. Caputo’s “A Rumor of War” (1977), which sold two million copies and was translated into 15 languages.
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Mr. Caputo wrote in “A Rumor of War” that his book was about “the things men do in war and the things war does to them.” It opens with an account of Mr. Caputo’s enthusiastic enlistment in the Marine Corps as a 24-year-old Midwesterner, driven by a need to prove his courage and manhood, followed by his 16-month tour of duty as a platoon commander and infantry lieutenant.
He vividly recorded the toll on the soldier’s spirit of the punishing heat, dust, malarial mosquitoes, disease-laden water and minimal hygiene. Those physical challenges were augmented by the confusion about what the platoon under his command was supposed to accomplish in its daily patrols — purportedly to secure the perimeter around the Danang airstrip essential to the safe passage of supplies and soldiers.
It was especially difficult to pinpoint an enemy, hidden and shielded as they were by the thick growth of jungle and by their deadly mines and booby traps. The Vietcong — guerrilla fighters supporting the Communist government in Hanoi — were experienced at warfare, and the periodic skirmishes were bloody, costing the lives of men to whom Mr. Caputo had grown close.
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Alex Zanardi has passed away at 59.
For those who may not remember, Mr. Zanardi was a prominent and talented racing driver.
On Sept 15, 2001, he entered an Indy-style race near Klettwitz, Germany. Originally called the German 500, it was renamed the American Memorial 500 in honor of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks four days earlier. Zanardi was leading with 13 laps remaining, when he appeared to accelerate too quickly while exiting a pit stop.
He lost control, and his car swerved across a grassy area and onto the track. He spun into the path of an oncoming driver, Alex Tagliani of Canada, who broadsided Zanardi’s car while traveling roughly 200 miles per hour.
Zanardi’s chassis was split in two, and debris scattered across the track. He said in a 2004 appearance on “The Late Show With David Letterman” that he was administered last rites with the oil of his car’s engine. He was airlifted by helicopter to a Berlin hospital, and doctors amputated both legs above the knee. Tagliani was not seriously injured.
My understanding is that what the doctors did was less “amputation” and more “cleaning up what was left” and replacing Mr. Zanardi’s blood. His legs were scattered all over the track.
I’ve mentioned this book before, but the first chapter of Stephen Olvey’s Rapid Response: My Inside Story as a Motor Racing Life-saver describes the accident and the medical response. Nobody, ever survives a bilateral traumatic amputation of both legs. The fact that Mr. Zanardi did is a tribute to excellent medical planning, especially by Dr. Olvey, some luck, and Mr. Zanardi’s toughness.
Charming, optimistic and an easygoing storyteller, Zanardi often joked about making himself taller with his prosthetics. In his droll appearance with Letterman, who is co-owner of an IndyCar team, he said that he no longer had to worry about washing his socks, and that he received so much German blood during transfusions in Berlin, he should have been given a German passport.
Then he swiveled his left prosthesis to eye level and placed a drinking cup on the bottom of his shoe.
Some people wondered whether he was scared to drive again, Zanardi told Letterman, but he considered himself less vulnerable than before his accident. “If I break one of my legs, I only need a 4-millimeter screw and I can fix it very rapidly,” he said to laughter from the audience.
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He began competing in touring car championships — street cars modified for racing — along with sprint series races. In 2019, he drove the prestigious 24-hour endurance race at Daytona with three teammates, using a modified BMW steering wheel that permitted him to drive without wearing his prosthetics.
“I feel a bit like Jimi Hendrix,” he told The New York Times before the race. “I play with both my hands.”
He also became a competitive hand-cyclist.
In 2011, he won the handcycle division of the New York City Marathon and followed by winning two gold medals and a silver medal at both the 2012 Paralympics in London and the 2016 Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro.
He was credited in 2017 with becoming the first adaptive athlete to break nine hours in an Ironman Triathlon: swimming 2.4 miles with a buoyancy device and without his prosthetics; using a handcycle to bike 112 miles; and completing the 26.2-mile marathon in a racing wheelchair. He finished in 8 hours 58 minutes 59 seconds.
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