Freelance war correspondent Michael Yon doesn't explain the use of this teepee in Afghanistan except to say that it's a memorial to an American unit's war dead. MY's apparently in need of money to continue. He's still worth it. I'm still sending him some. You should too. (Uh, actually he does explain the teepee. The unit is the 2nd ID, the "Indian Head" division.)
Via Lone Star Times.
Want to help?
Chaplain's Fund Office
Bldg 44, 761st Tank Battalion Ave.
Fort Hood, TX 76544-5000
Checks should be made payable to COTF (Chapel's Tithes and Offerings Fund) with a note on the memo line stating "Nov. 5 Tragedy."
The old media is saying Army Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan killed twelve and wounded thirty-one at Fort Hood, northwest of Austin, today because he was being deployed to Iraq the war and "was upset about it." Sure. I'll bet.
The FBI, always quick to put its foot in its mouth, already is saying it was not terrorism. As if they could possibly know. Sounds like jihad to me, pure and simple. Otherwise the fool would have killed himself, eh? Rather than execute and cripple strangers.
MORE: Instapundit, as usual on any big breaking news, has a good roundup. More Jihad evidence. Naturally, pathetically, it comes from a British newspaper. Well, Fox had it, too. You know, that news service Barry-the-journalism-expert hates so much. Meanwhile, Newsweak (who else?) blames the Pentagon for overstressing troops like the noble doctor. No Jihad on their radar. Surprise, surprise.
Caption says the "reporters" are studying the inscriptions on the shovels for the ceremonial dirt-turning for a memorial tree for fallen American troops. You know, while Barry dithers about whether they need reinforcements or not. This is what the legacy media does these days instead of asking hard questions. Bush quietly met with the survivors of the fallen. Barry turns their deaths into a photo op and a tree-planting. Frankly I think he prefers them fallen. The fallen don't talk back.
Via Mudville Gazette.
This seems to be it, as far as the American military is concerned, for the UH-1 Huey, the workhorse troop- and casualty-mover of the Vietnam war. Course the feeling of the nose-down takeoff, the wind roaring through the open side doors, and the distinctive sound of the rotor blades from the ground as one passes over will live on in memory, until the last veteran passes on. Few of them ever even knew it was, officially, called the Iroquois.
The Rocky Mountain News closed in February, the first large daily to do so in the Internet age. In a lengthy but candid postmortem, John Temple, editor and publisher in the paper's last eleven years, wields the scalpel. Quite fairly, for one who shares the blame:
"We didn't understand the Web...Our online objectives kept changing...The Web was an afterthought all along....There's still too much of a sense of entitlement in the industry." Audio and transcript here. Temple also has a blog.
Neither television or radio killed newspapers, though both give the news away free. So that bugaboo should be put to rest. But the Web is primarily text, which competes directly, and also can be accessed at any hour, as well as old or new teevee and radio newsclips. Thus. Still, it's management's appalling lack of imagination to find ways to compete with Craigslist, et al, that has hurt the most.
The World Wildlife Federation's "commemoration" ad for 9/11, according to ad agency DDB Brazil. The fine print in the upper right says: The 2004 Indonesian "tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11." Yeah, let's compare corpses, shall we? Just keep those donations coming folks. First, the federation claimed it was rogue work and they didn't approve it. Later they admitted they did.
Thirty years ago this fall, the first daily newspaper I worked for went under. It was a PM and they were dying everywhere then, apparently unable to compete with television news. Or so it was said at the time, though this was in the days before cable and the rise of local teevee news.
You might say the old Huntington (WVA) Advertiser (which hit the streets in 1874) was a trend setter, in the vanguard of today's newspaper debacle, in which AMs are collapsing like the PMs of old. Blamed, now, on the Internet. Maybe.
Anyhow, the folks who were in at the end of the old paper are having a reunion in October in the city (famous for its Swinefest--Think Pig) that has grown with a stylish new bridge among other things. My at-home dad schedule will prevent me from attending, but I'll link their good reunion web site here for anyone interested. And wish them well. The how-it-all-began. More or less.
Somehow I don't think naming Obamacare after the famously overweight boozer and skirt-chaser is going to boost the chances of it passing. Not even if, as Dan Riehl says, there are some new features:
"...amending it to include mandatory long distance swimming lessons, as well as CPR and breath control classes for all Americans. Apparently one young woman wasn't enough for Teddy. Now he can play a roll in the un-timely demise of more Americans than he could even count."
The Dems and their captive media may have loved the deceased hypocrite, but many Americans did not. So it's still going to be pass-it-at-your-political-peril for those up for re-election next year.
"For all the talk of how much he cared for the weakest members of society, the fact is he helped kill tens of millions of the most vulnerable."
Think Viet Nam, Cambodia, Iraq, aborted babies, Mary Jo Kopechne, etc. I will, once again, defy convention and skip the hagiography for the dead liberal senator who I always found, at best, a curious fellow. The Brothers Judd, above, include a bit of the usual Big Media swoon, along with their biting commentary. Nevermind one-term Barry's equally incoherent praise.
I saw ol' Ted in person several times. He was enormously corpulent. Jowly. He was always campaigning for more tax money for more issues to "fight" more problems. Did he ever create a single thing on his own?
Via Random Jottings.
UPDATE: Teddy the boozer in his cups. Via Instapundit. And...
"Someone told me a few months ago that Auschwitz would be a life-changer for me, and they were right, but I would like to emphasize that it is a good change. In the six weeks since I was there, the majority of my previous petty concerns have stopped mattering to me, completely...It has been a very surprising and welcome change. My experience of life is different, in a good way."
Our neighborhood post office, Chimney Corners, is on a list of seven hundred the U.S.P.O. may close due to a budget crunch. I have to say that we would hardly miss it, except for the stamp machines.
For a long time we've used the UPS store nearby. Much quicker service, nicer clerks, more expensive probably but maybe not by much. We would miss our nice mailman. I suppose he would be gone, too. Course we pay most of our bills online, like half the rest of the country. Part of the P.O.'s problem, no doubt.
From the, "If it ain't broke, government will fix it until it is" department:
Congress has banned "distributing children's books printed before 1985."
Why? Because the ink might contain lead. Are our pols brilliant? They probably only watch TV anyhow.
Via Instapundit.
Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft has written a touching obituary for his dearly departed mother. Worth a read.
Via Power Line.
It's heresy, I know. Tough. Cronkite never was "the most trusted man in America," except to those whose opinions he supported blatantly, flagrantly on the air every weeknight on cBS news. Somewhere along the line he must have been a real journalist but it didn't last long.
We all read that LBJ said he knew he had to resign when he "lost" Walter Cronkite on the Vietnam War. A real journalist would have been able to figure out that, shocking as TET 1968 was, it was not a victory for the enemy -- like Uncle Walty and his broadcast pals said it was. Over and over and over. But don't get me wrong. I'm only blaming them for a lack of professionalism. The Pentagon and Congress lost the war all on their own.
UPDATE: I pop off, but this guy does it thoughtfully. Barry, meanwhile, blithely joins the sheep. No surprise.
It's the dancer Michael Jackson that I remember. That was years ago, before the plastic surgery and the scandals. He did and still reminds me of Jimmy Cagney, not because I'm old enough to have seen Cagney in person or his movies upon their release. I saw these two (in three clips) on television when I was a kid in the 1950s and the boob tube played lots of old black-n-white movies. What a dancer Cagney was.
The U.S. Navy has stopped searching for the flight deck and data recorders that went down with the remains of Air France 447 in the Atlantic off Brazil. French surface ships gave up Friday, though a French submarine continues to prowl the depths, and there is talk of more searching begining July 14. So, with still no clear proof of what happened, let the speculation continue in earnest.
A remarkable, very readable Web-centric piece on Thomas Jefferson, warts and all. His Aunt Judith, his father's sister, was Mr. B's seven greats grandmother.
Via In Search of Jefferson's Moose.
Seventeen is the official number killed in the Iranian election protests, but one hundred fifty is closer to the truth, according to some witnesses on the ground. After today's "massacre," both totals are bound to go higher. The whole thing now looks like a repeat of Tiananmen Square.
UPDATE: So it seems. June 24. Remember the date. Although the open chest wound photo at the second link is (as stated) older--from June 20.
From what I've read so far, she was more of a bystander to the Iranian election protest than an active participant. But it's probable that her Bassij assassin singled her out because she was a woman living in a misogynistic dictatorship. There's no doubt that Neda Agha-Soltan is a martyr now--though it may be only to a failed revolution.
U.S. Navy Ensign Osmus has been dead for sixty-seven years, but I didn't know about him until I came across his story reading Shattered Sword, The Untold Story of The Battle of Midway. Now I keep imagining him staring at the Japanese sailor coming at him with an axe as he held onto the chain rail on the stern of Arashi, a destroyer in Nippon's First Carrier Striking Force.
Osmus, a TBD Devastator torpedo-bomber pilot from the carrier Yorktown, had crashed in the sea, been plucked out by Arashi's crew and interrogated by Captain Watanabe Yusumasa. Then Watanabe ordered Osmus thrown off the stern. He grabbed hold of the chain rail; hence the sailor with the axe. Odd that his Web memorial at the University of Illinois makes no mention of his murder, though the 2007 book's authors know it well enough and add: "Watanabe did not survive the war. Had he lived, it is likely he would have met the hangman's noose as a war criminal."
UPDATE: To be fair, I suppose I should link to this, which shows how much things have changed.
While the crazed shooter, as usual, gets the news, the dead security guard plays second fiddle. Pity. Stephen Tyrone Johns, 39, was a brave man, obviously, and well worth remembering.
Via Simply Jews.
UPDATE: The American Jewish Committee has set up a fund to raise money for his family, which includes a new child.
This photoshopped image, by a commenter on this pilot's forum, shows where the jet's recovered vertical stabilizer apparently tore off--though whether in mid-air or on impact with the ocean is unknown. Meanwhile, previous notions of a superbolt of lightning frying the plane's electronics apparently have been quashed by this updated meteorological analysis:
"* Lightning -- Though in earlier versions of this study I had identified lightning as occurring in this mesoscale convective system, recent evidence from spaceborne and sferic sensors is pointing to the possibility that this system contained no lightning. Soundings do indicate moderate levels of instability, but there are indications in the literature that cumulonimbus clouds in oceanic equatorial regions entrain considerable quantities of drier, cooler air that dampen upward vertical motion in the lower portions of the storm, and in some way this reduces charge separation. In any case it does look fairly likely that we can rule out a lightning strike as being a factor in the A330 crash."
Indicating that turbulence within the storm apparently was the cause of the breakup at altitude unless there was some other factor which only analysis of the debris and/or the voice and data recordings could show.
I think one reason newspapers are dying, as I've said before, is that the front page has become a one-sided public scold. Any public figure who says anything that's not politically correct can count on getting bashed on the front page until they issue an abject apology.
But it only works one way: you have to offend a liberal. Thus a no-talent bozo like Letterman, late-night prattler on cBS, the smallest-audience television network, can call Sarah Palin a slut and imply the rape of her daughter and the front page remains silent. Letterman, after all, supports abortion. Palin does not. People have noticed and, having other cheaper, more diverse sources of information (such as the Internet) have stopped buying newspapers.
I keep thinking back to the scenes of four pilots on separate flight decks unknowingly converging over the Amazon jungle. The Brazilian 737 pilots are sharing family photographs and flirting with a flight attendant. The American pilots in the Legacy biz jet are puzzling over how to operate a digital camera.
Both groups are at Flight Level 370 (37,000 feet) in normal mode: eyes inside the boat, letting their autopilots, transponders and collision-avoidance gear do the work while assuming that Air Traffic Control has things well in hand. But the Legacy's transponder was on the blink and the controllers were asleep at the switch. Heckuva tale about what happened, here by journalist William Langewiesche.
His father's classic, Stick and Rudder, led me to try flying back in 1974 in a Cessna 150 over South Florida. I was defeated practicing stalls above Boca Raton. Could not get the feel of falling out of my stomach or the picture of disaster out of my head. And it was too expensive. I stuck to scuba diving.
Now that the Brazilian air force's media-assisted "debris trail" has been debunked, it's probably best to ignore whatever the mainstream media produces on the disappearance. But several good sources remain. One of the best is the (mostly) informed speculation at Airliners.net. Best weather analysis still is here.
UPDATE: Well, make that debunked, and then resucitated with more detail than before.
Bad things can happen when the Airbus's electrical systems go out:
"Simply, the Airbus 330 is one of the few commercial aircraft that is completely fly-by-wire [i.e., fully automated by computer]. The Airbus 320, of Hudson River fame, has mechanical backups, but the Airbus 330 and 340 don’t."
So when their computers quit, what's left? Exactly nothing. Not much. Except, uh, prayer.
And, above all, whatever you do, as Douglas Adams would say (did say, in fact): Don't Panic.
Via Simply Jews.
Conservative bloggers like to believe the reason that so many American newspapers are for sale, and why Time and Newsweek can now be called the skinny weeklies, is because of their biased reporting. Well, maybe. But they've always been biased. Back in the 1960s-70s, they were biased to the right, instead of the left.
Insiders, of course, blame the loss of advertising to the Internet, especially the classifieds, the lifeblood of many fish wrappers. I give this excuse far more credence than the bias. But I also have come to think that it's the basic irrelevance of the content.
Political correctness, like whacking some radio talker when he makes a racist remark, has become the business of the front page, and endless scolding. News, unless it's politically neutral or has a politically-correct peg, is simply no longer news. Like the first Muslim-honor beheading in New York, which is excused and shuffled off to join what's left of the truss ads. Can't criticise Islam. T'ain't PC. Trouble is, PC is boring as well as gutless. So why read those who peddle it? Why not hunt the Internet for the real news? Not to mention the classifieds?
Pretty cool, unless you're a committed skeptic dedicated only to your pleasure and pets. How shallow.
Via No Left Turns.
The story of courageous newspaper journalists and their editor bringing down a nefarious president? As we have been told, and told, and told for a generation. Or that of a disgruntled deputy FBI director who used the journalists and their editor to bring down a president the director believed was too close to reigning reining in his theretofore nefarious agency? Stratfor reports, you decide.
MORE: Cynical manipulation of the press and the public, told by an old master journalist.
Via No Left Turns.
Amusing little article here in Columbia Journalism Review followed by even more amusing comments.
The top half of the comments are the usual remarks from the usual crowd of Big Media players or wannabees, fiddling around as though nothing much is happening to the craft other than a vexing problem of layoffs and declining profits. The bottom half is the angry audience, lured to the site by Instapundit. They are burning (and sometimes a little shrill) to let the fiddlers know that their Barrymania is going to lead to far more losses. Indeed, it may be too late to turn it around even if the fiddlers were inclined to play a new, objective tune. Assuming they still have the chops for objectivity, which is doubtful.
UPDATE: Indeed, the lickspittle reporting continues, as Iraq suicide bombings become "progress" on Barry's watch.
Disney's incredibly inept coverup is finally, sadly, but voluminously (and, indeed, artfully) exposed.
His movies seem dated to me now. Like me, I suppose. We've used his salad dressing for years. The jokes on the labels were some of the first that Mr. B. could read, and he insists on buying more whenever we shop for groceries. I also liked his wife. Didn't everyone?
MORE: I used to write obits, but I would never have attempted a movie star. This one is good.
UPDATE: Glad I missed this aspect of him, however: "President Jimmy Carter appointed him as his delegate to nuclear disarmament talks at the United Nations...In 1995, Newman bought a controlling interest in The Nation, a liberal political journal, and even began writing for it occasionally....Newman is also on the board of Cease Fire, a gun control group funded by prominent celebrities...."
Nevermind this sort of hagiographic obituary babble. No doubt the Great Writer helped open some blinded eyes on the Left, as well as do humankind a favor by helping bring down the Soviet Union. Pity he had to do it while apologizing for lynching--and continuing that right up until his death.
Via Creaky Pavillion.
A real baby killer goes free, while two soldiers of the right come home dead, two years after they were captured patrolling the Israel-Lebanon border. But revenge will come, too, and it will be sweet.
Via Simply Jews.
I don't like reading it, and so I don't write it. And that's one reason I won't write an obit-hymn for George Carlin, who I think mainly contributed to the coarsening of our culture. If you disagree, you can join in the wake here, but to paraphrase some of the commenters there, he seemed to have become just an old liberal ranting at conservatives; I thought he was brilliantly funny when I was twenty-five, but I grew up. He didn't.
Austin developer and former city councilman Barnstone could be quite a character, and we didn't always get along when he was in politics. But he was one of the first people I met in Austin and I always liked him. I was sorry to hear that he killed himself, still a young sixty-one, but health problems seem to be behind it. I even considered buying one of his first downtown condos, but the price, a mere forty thousand dollars, which is nothing today, seemed too exorbitant for so small a space. Later, I would buy someone else's near the river for almost twice that and be glad to get it. I wish he had become mayor, as he tried to do in 1991. He would have been a lot of fun at it.
UPDATE: The family's paid obituary for the Austin daily is here.
When Dr. King was murdered, forty years ago today, a pall of shock fell over our almost-entirely white class at Infantry Officer's Candidate School at Fort Benning, Ga. His goal of changing hearts and minds certainly had affected all of ours. If anyone was racist enough to be glad--and many of us were Southerners--they hid it well. They knew they would find no approbation. We knew that a giant had passed. We didn't guess there would be only midgets to follow.
MORE: The detail nobody remembers: Dr. King was a Republican. Or that a Republican won passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act that banned segregation in stores and other "public accomodations."
Phillip Jones Griffiths, the Welsh photographer/author of Vietnam Inc.--an amazingly one-sided harangue on the Americans and Vietnamese unfortunate enough to have come under his lens--has died. He was 72. I have an old review copy of the 1971 book, which I acquired somewhere. It's the sort of thing Noam Chomsky would love. Did love, in fact, because as the BBC says, it "became crucial in challenging attitudes to the war" No kidding. It's also a good lesson in how photos can be made to seem more (or less) than they really are--for instance by the act of moving a headless doll into the foreground for enhanced pathos. The camera does lie. Even without photoshopping. Jones Griffiths proved it.
First off, it's worth mentioning that many gay people tiresomely assume that many others are, whether they will admit it or not. Particularly famous, talented and important people. Including the late sci-fi impresario Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who died the other day at age 90. Although none of his mainstream obituaries mention the detail, some gay bloggers take it for granted. Heresy, I suppose, to his most dedicated heterosexual fans. Otherwise, just an interesting notion. The Seablogger at Fresh Bilge has an intriguing mention of it.
MORE: I left a comment over at Mouth of the Brazos to the effect that all Clarke did was foresee the communications satellite. Wrongo.
I grew up fascinated by William F. Buckley, Jr., especially watching his debating style against socialists in the rare times that he appeared on television. I went from him to Ayn Rand and Barry Goldwater. Then I turned liberal, for reasons I forget, but which probably had to do with Civil Rights, until Reagan's second term began to bring me back to the fold. So I was ready when 9/11 made it a practical necessity. But it began with WFB. He was a great sailor, too, and wrote about it well.
The movies were depressing, with their usual nihilism. No wonder fewer watch the Oscars every year, and ticket buyers dwindle--though, in truth, you wouldn't know it from all the attention the blogosphere gave and gave and gave the show. But movies are supposed to touch the heart, not merely the political affiliation. I'm filing this one under obituaries because these lefty varmints are killing themselves. Not that I care, mind you.
UPDATE: Lowest viewership in history. Still, thirty-two million means the bottom hasn't been reached yet.
The surge is obviously working. You can tell because Iraq is no longer front page news very often, and most of the pols have stopped yammering about pulling out. But good Americans are still dying there, including this 37-year-old, Big Red One Iraqi army advisor and milblogger from Colorado Springs. Oddly enough, he left behind his own final post and this sayonara:
"I'm dead, but if you're reading this, you're not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact."
Via Instapundit
MORE: A friend who served with Olmsted at Fort Carson, CO, remembers him in this touching tribute. And word is finally trickling out about how AJO died: a sniper got him while he was trying to talk some insurgents into surrendering.
Hard as it is to imagine a football coach saying "wee-wee," that's the legend of how the popular (nay, ubiquitous) sports drink of Gatorade came to be, according to its inventor, Dr. J. Robert Cade, who died yesterday in Florida. He was 80. The first concoction wasn't so good, though. Native Texan Cade, who graduated from UT Southwestern medical school in Dallas, vomited.
David Bogner's touching tale about a British light infantryman who died, in what is now Israel, in 1917.
His father and mother (who live in San Antonio), and his fiance (re-deploying to Iraq as a medevac pilot)--are all Army. He left behind a web site, and a lot of friends.
Sometimes I wish the Internet wasn't quite so comprehensive. Even the most private people often wind up baring their souls in its electronic pages. Of course it helps not to be too curious, though that is sometimes hard to do. As we grow old, they say, the present recedes while the past marches forward. Thus a little curiosity, abetted by a search engine exploration on the name of an old girlfriend who ditched me for another guy many years ago, turned up the good news that they were still married, but the sad news that they had lost their only child. Clearly, curiosity punishes as well as rewards. I'm now haunted by their tragedy, knowing more than I really wanted to.
I never caught one of his performances, but I should have because I always admired the harmonica as a musical instrument and anyone who could play it well. I often tried, as rock pianist Ben Folds might say, but I was genetically-inclined to be a trumpet player. More or less. Michael Corcoran, writing Primich's obit in the daily, makes me want to buy his 1995 Texas blues CD "Mr. Freeze," which I will do here in a minute or two. Especially like Primich's chosen epitaph: "He changed his oil every 3,000 miles."
UPDATE: Corcoran is following the story, awaiting the medical examiner's report, but drugs, specifically heroin, is suspected as the cause of death at such a young age, just forty-nine.
MORE: Primich's memorial service is Oct. 28.
As inconvenient as it apparently has been for some of my rare but appreciated readers who have not noticeably returned, the TypeKey comment security system has done wonders for my productivity. I no longer have to waste time deleting scores of comment spam which were steadily rising into the hundreds every day. I gave up on trackbacks last year for the same reason, though I wasn't getting any trackbacks, anyhow. But Tom is one rare reader whose vanished comments I especially miss. A fellow OC-504er, who spent his time in Vietnam with the 1st Cav and now commands his local VFW, he was clever enough to track down my sister-in-law's funeral Aug. 6 in Indiana and surprise us by showing up, an hour or so away from his own Ohio River town. Hope you can eventually figure out how to make the registery work, Tom. I'd like to have you back.
The Dallas Morning News has a good, free piece on her. If you want the most, the daily is the place to go, though they're still hiding it all behind free registration. She was the only person in the world they referred to on second reference as Mrs. So if you want real candor, you should probably go elsewhere.
The Grande Dame of Texas Democrat politics, though she rarely took any but a cheerleader's part, will be the subject of eulogies for days to come. Here's an early obit. The daily is hiding its main story behind free registration, which is too bad, but the sidebars are available. I suppose one is expected to be nice about the dead until the body, or the ashes, are in the ground, and I expect the media will do that, in large measure. But there are many ways to look at Lady Bird, some of them not at all complimentary. A few things she did and more that her deceased husband, LBJ, did to her and in her name. Remains to be seen if they'll see the light.
UPDATE Jau, at Just Muttering, wonders what I am implying. She might well ask. Mostly I'm referring to details in Robert A. Caro's "The Path to Power, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 1" about LBJ's political rise. He is known in Texas as the pol who stole an election to the US Senate. Caro shows how he and Lady Bird got rich, by using his position to barge ahead of others in getting radio and television licenses--the basis of their wealth. She acquiesced in this, making her a co-conspirator, if you will. Nobody ever charged them with wrongdoing, but it seems clear that he would never have received the licenses if he wasn't in Congress at the time. What he later did to her is also in the book, cuckolding her (if that term can be applied to a woman) and generally treating her badly in front of others, all of which she again tacitly approved by not leaving him. Sort of a Hillary character without the political ambition. Shyer, though. But you're not likely to see any of this in the MSM, even after her funeral. So, if you're interested, read Caro's book.
Staff Sergeant Malone, of Wills Point, Texas, a small town east of Dallas, "was G.I. from a very young age. His grandmother, Monah Malone, said he talked about joining the military after watching 'Top Gun' as a boy. He picked a specific branch - the army - in seventh grade and followed through on his dream after finishing high school."
Almost the whole town, a place known for its wild roses, turned out for his memorial service.
The best line I've heard on author Kurt Vonnegut is that when one was young his books and ideas were most appealing. As one got older, the books were still amusing but the author's pacifism was annoying for its impracticality. Or something like that. He was also, for me, another casualty of September 11. Because when he joined the Left in comparing President Bush to Hitler, I lost interest in Mr. Vonnegut. Nevertheless, we should say of the dead: R.I.P.
Army Specialist Donica, 22, from Spring, north of Houston, was killed by a sniper in Baghdad Dec. 28. He was the 3,000th U.S. serviceman to die during the war, and therefore the "grim milestone" of 2006 for much of the MSM. Wikipedia misspelled his name in their haste. His family, having none of it, made "a point of deflecting attention" from the fact, according to the March edition of Texas Monthly. Since then, they have put up an impressive Web site "dedicated to the memory of Dustin Donica, the Donica Family, and Dustin's brothers in arms." The site includes photos and background Celtic music, as well as "American Soldier," a country ballad by Toby Keith. Texas Monthly eulogized Donica as one of more than 275 Texans killed in Iraq, "the highest number from any state other than California, and each one has left behind not just a family but a community."
Checking in with Mystic Chords now and then to play his latest jazz video, gradually got me to thinking about our family legend, my uncle by marriage, the late big band and jazz drummer Don Lamond. He played with Woody Herman's big bands in the 1940s, then in the 1950s with be-bop artists like Charlie Parker.
"Lamond developed a reputation as an innovative, bebop-oriented drummer, and he can be heard on several classic bebop recordings, including Charlie Parker's 'Relaxin' at Camarillo,' Serge Chaloff's 'Blue Serge," and guitarist Johnny Smith's 'Moonlight in Vermont.'"
Later, he played with the studio band of the Tonight Show when Steve Allen was the host. Here's a YouTube clip from the Tonight Show of Uncle Don in a drum-off with Louis Bellson and Lionel Hampton.
He was married to my mother's sister for many years. They divorced in the late 1950s, and even word of him dropped out of my life after that. He remarried and moved to Florida in the 1970s, playing with a band at Disney World when it opened. He was still playing there shortly before he died in 2003, at age 82. I was too young to have known him, but he was a family legend--like some musicians, a vaguely disreputable one, and therefore always intriguing.
The dean of Texas Leftist activists, the acerbic writer and public speaker Molly Ivins, died Wednesday at her home in Austin after a long struggle with cancer. She was only 62.
Who? Why, the Japanese inventor of Ramen instant noodles, who died Friday of a heart attack. He was 96.
Frankly, the life of Teddy Kollek, who died this morning at 95, interests me more than that of the other celebrities who died recently, James Brown and Gerald Ford. Arguably, Kollek influenced the lives of more people as mayor of the city holy to the world's three major religions:
"As one of the 'Ben Gurion boys,' Teddy Kollek was mostly a behind-the-scenes shaper of Israel’s history from its earliest days - until he stepped into the limelight as mayor of Jerusalem from 1965 to 1993. It was only then that his outstanding skills as a master administrator and familiar of international glitterati from Hollywood to Monaco came to the fore in his quest for support and funds to develop Israel’s backwater capital into a world-class city...Teddy gave Jerusalem, new and old, a new infrastructure, personally overseeing every detail, from garbage collection to a new sewage system to replace the 2,000-year old Roman pipes under the odoriferous Old City bazaar, while working hard to give Jew and Arab, Muslim and Christian, ultra-religious and secular communities, their place as citizens in the reunited capital."
Rest at Debka. More here and here and here.
If you're not feeling profound, the Fat Guy has the last word on the recent spate of celebrity kickoffs:
"Weird old week for the Grim Reaper — James Brown, Gerald Ford, and Saddam Hussein. If I were Death, I’d just want to go home, take a long shower, and have a big old bourbon rocks in front of some crappy action movie after that trio."
Read. It. All.
After a week stranded in a snowy Oregon woods with his wife and their daughters, an infant and a toddler, James Kim tried to save them by going for help. Their maps suggested it was a short hike to a nearby village. But they were farther away than they thought, the maps didn't show how rough the wooded terrain would be, and the 35-year-old San Francisco technology editor apparently got lost before dying of hypothermia. Two days after he left them, his family was rescued, thanks to signals from cell phones they had left on. His body wasn't found for two more days. You have to admire their resourcefulness, reported here and here, and his heroic decision to seek the help that hadn't come. But the irony that, all along, food and shelter was only a few miles away, stings.
UPDATE This sad story has produced many suggestions across the blogosphere for emergency gear, to be stored in the car all the time, to the extent that's practical, such as here and here and here. Via Instapundit
Reading "Looking Around Mississippi," a limited-edition 2005 photo and essay book by Mississippi television weatherman and features writer Walt Grayson, I was reminded there is more than one location for the grave of Delta blues musician and composer Robert Johnson who inspired Elvis and the Rolling Stones and many more.
His 1938 "death certificate simply said he was buried at Zion Church," Grayson writes. "For years no one knew which one."
They're still confused, judging from this web site and this one, the former choosing to locate Johnson's remains under a simple flat marker in a family plot behind Payne Chapel in Quito (short for mosquito) reading "Resting in the Blues," and the latter preferring a more ornate cenotaph at Mount Zion Church at Sheppardtown in Leflore County. It says quite a lot more, including "his blues addressed generations he would never know."
Grayson, a Baptist minister, contends the "most likely" grave for Johnson is the one with the modest upright stone at Little Zion Church on the Money Road north of Greenwood, which has this reproduced in Johnson's handwriting: "I know that my Redeemer liveth and that He will call me from the Grave." Above that it says "he influenced millions beyond his time."
Each marker is attended by flowers sometimes and offerings most of the time, of pennies and half-empty pony bottles of Jack Daniels. The devout obviously are taking no chances.
Grayson's book, which is full of good reporting and fine photographs, is available via the publisher, and also starts at $144.95 $79.41 used at Amazon.
"Farrell said the high attendance showed the community’s care and support. The motorcyclists set up a lengthy wall of flags on both sides of Route 309 to honor Hartman. Richard E. Marcks, Allentown, is a permanent ride captain for the Fifth Division of the Patriot Guard Riders, one of the groups that was represented. 'When the family came to the funeral home and they saw the wall of flags, they broke down in tears,' Marcks said."
"Thomas L. Cook, who died at 54 when he was fatally hit by a car Sept. 11, spent much of his life recovering from the misadventures that plagued him even in the womb."
He kept coming back, and coming back, until he couldn't anymore.
Via A General Theory of Rubbish
Somehow, I managed to miss the death Friday of the fiery Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, 77, but Victor Davis Hanson does her obit proud, and brings in the Pope's recent problem as well.
"So long may you run, Ms. Fallaci, you who by now have learned that, yes, there is a soul, and, yes, yours was indeed saved for eternity if only for its singular courage and honesty alone. And dear Pope: clarify, contextualize, express sorrow over the wrong interpretation of your remarks, but please don’t apologize for the Truth—not now, not ever."
"'I did not want my tombstone to read, 'She kept a really clean house.' I think I'd like them to remember me by saying, 'She opened government to everyone,'" Richards said shortly before leaving office in January 1995."
Yet, in her support of the death penalty and a few other ways, she may also have been one of the last conservative Texas Democrats.
UPDATE And on it goes, days of Texas news media stories about her and the state funeral to come.
