Norm Macdonald. THR. Variety. Lawrence. Ben Sixsmith.
(If there are any of my readers who are unfamiliar with Albert Fish, he was a real jerk, and I strongly encourage you to think twice before you DuckDuckGo him.)
Hacker News thread (pretty respectful, and lots of links).
https://t.co/xeBTkWrGV1 pic.twitter.com/1qaiGpPmzg
— shoe (@shoe0nhead) September 14, 2021
I thought about embedding some of his bits from YouTube, but Variety already pulled a bunch of those together (including OJ).
This one goes out to FotB Dave: Don Collier. He did a lot of work on Westerns: “The High Chaparral”, “Bonanza”, “Death Valley Days”, “Branded”, and so on. He also did some movie work, including “Seven Ways from Sundown” (with Audie Murphy) and “Tombstone” (credited as “High Roller”).
Gilbert Seltzer has died at 106.
He was one of the last members of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. His death leaves only nine surviving members.
The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops was also known as the “Ghost Army”.
“We would move into the woods in the middle of the night, going through France, Belgium and Germany, and turn on the sound” — from blaring loudspeakers — “so it sounded like tanks were moving on the roads,” Mr. Seltzer told StoryCorps in 2019. “The natives would say to each other, ‘Did you see the tanks moving through town last night?’”
“They thought they were seeing them,” he added. “Imagination is unbelievable.”
…
Mr. Seltzer, an architect, was a platoon leader and later a lieutenant and adjutant of the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion, whose ranks included men who would go on to work in advertising, art, architecture and illustration, among them the future fashion designer Bill Blass, the photographer Art Kane and the painter Ellsworth Kelly.
The battalion handled the Ghost Army’s visual fakery; the 3132nd Signal Service Company was in charge of sound deception; the Signal Company, Special, devised realistic-sounding radio messages to throw off the Germans. The 406th Combat Engineer Company provided security.
In March 1945, in one of their most elaborate feats of trickery — during the critical Rhine River campaign, designed to finally crush Germany — the 23rd set up 10 miles south of the spot where two American Ninth Army divisions were to cross the river. To simulate a buildup of those divisions at their decoy location, the Ghost Army used inflated tanks, cannons, planes and trucks; sent out misleading radio messages about the American troops’ movements; and used loudspeakers to simulate the sound of soldiers building pontoon boats.
The Germans fell for the ruse, firing on the 23rd’s divisions, while Ninth Army troops crossed the Rhine with nominal resistance.
Nino Castelnuovo, Italian actor who was perhaps most famous for a French film: he played opposite Catherine Deneuve in “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”.
He was apparently most famous for “Police Academy 2” and “Police Academy 3”, but he had a pretty lengthy career before those. He was prolific on TV, appearing on “Movin’ On” and a lot of ’70s cop shows…
…including “Mannix”. (“Deathrun”, season 2, episode 13. This is one of the ones with an old Army buddy of Mannix: however, Mr. Metrano was not the Army buddy.)
Michael Constantine, noted actor.
He gets a lot of press for “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” but he did a lot of other work before (and after) that. No “Mannix”, but “Kojack”, “Homicide: Life on the Street”, “Law and Order: Original Recipe”, “Hunter”, multiple appearances on “Quincy, M.E.”, “Electra Woman and Dyna Girl”, late period “Perry Mason”, and the list goes on. He was even in “The Hustler”, which we watched just a few weeks ago.
I don’t do NetFlix. I’ve never watched an episode of “Tiger King”, and I’m not sure if any of my readers have.
But just in case: Erik Cowie.
Damn.
— David Simon (@AoDespair) September 6, 2021
Michael K. Williams, “Omar” on “The Wire”, “Leonard” in “Hap and Leonard”, “Chalky White” on “Boardwalk Empire”, and lots of other stuff. THR.
Keith McCants. He was picked fourth overall by Tampa Bay in the 1990 draft, but turned into a bust. Tampa Bay let him go after three years, he bounced around a bit (playing with Houston and Arizona) before leaving football, and fell into addiction. He was 53, and apparently died of an overdose.
Jean-Paul Belmondo, legendary French New Wave star. (“Breathless”, among other credits.)
Tony Selby, British actor. (“Doctor Who”, “Eastenders”).
I’m on vacation, but I’ve got a little bit of time, so a couple of quick notes:
Remember the Murdaugh murders I wrote about a few months ago?
On Saturday, someone shot Alex Murdaugh. Mr. Murdaugh is the father of Paul and husband of Maggie. Reports are that he was shot in the head, but the wound is “superficial” and he’s expected to recover.
Obit watch: Willard Scott.
…
Though he was meant to represent the new, late-model television weatherman, Mr. Scott brought to the job a brand of shtick that harked back to earlier times. He seemed simultaneously to embody the jovial, backslapping Rotarian of the mid-20th century, the midway barker of the 19th and, in the opinion of at least some critics, the court jester of the Middle Ages.
There was the time, for instance, that he delivered the forecast dressed as Boy George. There was the time he did so dressed as Carmen Miranda, the “Brazilian bombshell” of an earlier era, dancing before the weather map in high heels, ruffled pink gown, copious jewelry and vast fruited hat. There was the time, reporting from an outdoor event, that he kissed a pig on camera.
The pig did not take kindly to being kissed and squealed mightily.
…
From 1952 to 1962, Mr. Scott also played the title character on “Bozo the Clown,” the WRC-TV version of a syndicated children’s show. In the early ’60s, on the strength of his Bozo, McDonald’s asked him to develop a clown character to be used in its advertising.
As Ronald McDonald, Mr. Scott did several local TV commercials for the franchise but was passed over — in consequence of his corpulence, he later said — as its national representative.
My sincere thanks to Alan Simpson for sending over a tribute from the Libertarian Futurist Society to L. Neil Smith.
…
Although not as widely recognized by mainstream critics for his social conscience and passion for justice and liberty during his lifetime as this principled and idealistic author deserved, Smith regularly incorporated such themes into both his fiction and nonfiction.
For instance, a dramatic exposure of the evils of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust was at the moral center of The Mitzvah, Smith’s novel (cowritten with Aaron Zelman) about a Catholic priest, influenced by socialist ideas of the 1960s, who discovers that the German immigrant parents who raised him actually adopted him and that his true parents were a Jewish couple murdered in the Holocaust.
Smith, a longtime libertarian activist, also wrote two non-fiction books, Lever Action and Down with Power, that expressed his libertarian views, and founded, and regularly contributed essays to, The Libertarian Enterprise, an anarcho-capitalist journal.
Carolyn Shoemaker, comet hunter.
…
In spite of feeling nervous around scientific instruments as simple as a calculator, she offered to help her husband, the revered planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker, with a project gathering data on comets and asteroids.
Dr. Shoemaker believed that collisions with Earth by comets had been responsible for transporting to the planet water and other elements necessary for life, meaning that humans “may truly be made of comet ‘stuff,’” Ms. Shoemaker wrote in her essay. Dr. Shoemaker also worried that a comet hitting Earth could threaten human civilization. Yet relatively little scientific attention had been paid to the frequency and effects of cometary collision with planets.
As the dark phase of the lunar cycle began, making it easier to see faint objects in outer space, the Shoemakers would travel to an observatory on Palomar Mountain near San Diego. To locate previously unknown comets and asteroids, they aimed to photograph as much of the night sky as possible. The chirping of birds signaled bedtime.In the afternoons, Dr. Shoemaker would take the film they had used the previous night and develop it in a darkroom, then turn over the negatives to Ms. Shoemaker. Using a stereoscope, she would compare exposures of the same block of sky at different times. If anything moved against the relatively fixed background of stars, it would appear to float in the viewing device’s eyepiece.
Ms. Shoemaker was charged with discerning what was the grain of the film (and perhaps dust on it) and what was an actual image of light emitted by an object hurtling through space. “With time,” she wrote, “I saw fainter and fainter objects.”
It took a few years before she found her first new comet, in 1983. By 1994, in addition to hundreds of asteroids, she had discovered 32 comets, a number considered by the United States Geological Survey and others to represent the world record at the time.
Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker are the “Shoemaker” in “Shoemaker-Levy 9”.
One comet, known as Shoemaker-Levy 9 (named in part for their associate David Levy), had stood out from the rest. Rather than making a lonely journey through the cosmic vacuum, Shoemaker-Levy 9 was on a collision course with Jupiter. By detecting the comet shortly before impact, Ms. Shoemaker gave scientists an opportunity to examine whether or not comets slamming into planets represented major astronomical events — and to test the hypotheses of her husband’s work.
The result had all the drama the Shoemakers might have imagined: whirling fire balls, a plume of hot gas as tall as 360 Mount Everests and a series of huge wounds that appeared in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Amateur astronomers could witness much of it with store-bought telescopes.
Anticipation of Shoemaker-Levy 9 and the spectacular show it produced made the front page of The New York Times and the cover of Time magazine, which called the Shoemakers “a husband-and-wife scientific duo who spend their evenings scanning the skies for heavenly intruders.” The couple and Mr. Levy were featured in a Person of the Week segment of the nightly ABC News broadcast and met with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.
…
Today, professional astronomers use remotely controlled telescopes and digital detection software. They tend not to pull all-nighters in remote mountain regions, guiding telescopes across the night sky and developing film in their own darkrooms, as the Shoemakers did. Yet scientists still depend on methods that Ms. Shoemaker perfected.
“She and her colleagues set the stage for how to identify what we would call minor bodies in our solar system, such as comets and asteroids,” Dr. Wiseman said. “We still use the technique of looking for the relatively fast transverse motions of comets and asteroids in our own solar system as compared to the slower or more fixed position of stars.”
I am seeing reports (from Lawrence and in other places) that the great libertarian SF writer L. Neil Smith has died.
However, I have been unable to find a source for this that I am willing to give credibility, links, or page views to. I’ll either update or post a new obit if this changes.
Stipulated: he was a cranky old liberal whose politics drove me up a tree.
But: Lou Grant.
He made a point of largely avoiding comedy — out of fear, he said in a 2002 appearance at Vanderbilt University, and because “in those days you got discovered by doing the drama shows as a guest star.” But he agreed to audition for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” because, as he said in an Archive of American Television interview, Lou Grant “was the best character I’d ever been asked to do” in either television or film.
Lou was a hard-drinking, straight-shooting, short-tempered journalist who had tender emotions but did not plan to show them; a strong aura of professional and personal integrity; a fear that he had outlived his era; and “a great common core of honor,” as Mr. Asner told Robert S. Alley and Irby B. Brown, the authors of “Love Is All Around: The Making of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show.’”
416 credits in IMDB as an actor. That’s impressive. And he did do more than a few cop shows, including both the good and bad “Hawaii 5-0”, but never a “Mannix”.
(Here’s an IMDB list of people with over 300 acting credits. Mr. Asner is listed at #92, but the list hasn’t been updated and his count is off. Also, many of the people ahead of him are either porn actors or voice actors: Mel Blanc comes in at #9 with 1,220 credits. Eric Roberts and James Hong are the first two non-porn, not primarily a voice actor, people I recognize: Roberts with 638 credits and Hong with 444 to date.)
(What about “Up”? No comment. I’ve never seen it.)
There are times when I just want to quote the entire NYT lead: not because I’m lazy (though I am) but because they encapsulate the obit so perfectly, anything I could say would be superfluous.
Seriously, just go read this one.
For the historical record, obits from the paper of record for:
David Roberts, noted climber and climbing writer.
Michael Nader, actor. He was “Dex Dexter” in “Dynasty”, and “Dimitri Marick” on “All My Children”, among other credits.
Once again, pushing the boundaries of an obit, but: if you would prefer to read about Dorothy Parker’s tombstone in the NYT instead of the NYPost, well, here you go.
Charlie Watts. THR. THR 2. BBC.
I am slightly tempted to make “never call me your drummer again” a “leadership secret of a non-fictional character” – indeed, someone on Hacker News cited this as an example of managing a high-performing team – but I can’t condone punching a cow-orker. Even if they do suffer from “lead singer’s disease”.
Buckie Leach, coach of the US women’s foil team. Lee Kiefer, one of his team members, became the first US woman to win an individual gold at the most recent games.
Mr. Leach was killed in a motorcycle accident.
Lloyd Dobyns Jr., noted NBC news correspondent. He’s another one of those NBC news guys I remember from when I was young.
I intended to note this a few days ago, but it got past me: Igor Oleksandrovych Vovkovinskiy passed away at 38. Mr. Vovkovinskiy was the tallest man in the United States: 7 feet, 8 inches.
Bill Clotworthy. You almost certainly never heard of him, but you’ve seen his work.
Or, perhaps more accurately, you haven’t seen his work.
Mr. Clotworthy was a long time “standards and practices executive” – in other words, a network censor – for NBC. His nickname was “Doctor No”.
…
In a 2002 interview, Clotworthy described one SNL sketch that never made it to air:
It revolved around “a bunch of guys in a fraternity house trying to light farts,” he recalled. “You didn’t see anything, but you heard the voiceover and then there was this big explosion, and Joe Piscopo was dressed as Smokey the Bear, and he came out and said that should be a lesson to everyone — don’t fart with fire.”
He said he was OK with it but was overruled by his boss.
…
Those sound really cool. Amazon doesn’t list them, but there is a Kindle edition of Saturday Night Live: Equal Opportunity Offender: The Uncensored Censor.
Stretching the definition of an obit here, but: there was an unveiling ceremony for Dorothy Parker’s tombstone on Monday.
The story of Dorothy Parker’s ashes is almost as weird as the story of Evita’s body. After her death, her ashes sat in a crematory for six years, then in a filing cabinet in the former office of her (retired) lawyer. In 1988, her ashes were turned over to the NAACP (“In her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King Jr., and upon King’s death, to the NAACP.“)
The NACCP set up a memorial outside their headquarters in Baltimore. But when they moved in 2020, the organization returned the ashes to her family, who reburied them in Woodlawn Cemetery.
The New York Distilling Company in Williamsburg issued a commemorative gin to pay for the headstone.
Along with the gin, mourners left red roses near Parker’s grave, which lies next to those of her parents and grandparents.
The family plot is in a section of the 400-acre cemetery that includes the graves of writers such as Herman Melville and E.L. Doctorow — as well as a man dubbed “The Father of Mixology,’’ 19th century New York City bartender Jerry Thomas.
Brian Travers, founding member of UB40. Brain tumor got him at 62.
Marilyn Eastman, “Helen Cooper” in “Night of the Living Dead”.