Robert Morse, actor. THR. Other credits include “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” (both the Broadway musical and the film version), “Night Gallery”, “Trapper John, M.D.”, “Wild Palms”, the 1985 “Twilight Zone” revival, and a short called “Why I Live at the P.O.” based on the Eudora Welty story.
Dede Robertson, Pat Robertson’s wife.
I was going to blog that NYT article about Russian soldiers in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, with some snarky commentary about how “We told them not to do it, that it was dangerous, but they ignored us” sounds like some places I’ve worked.
Then I went searching for an image to insert, and instead found this:
Hello people who are here because of the NYT article with the paragraph about Co-60! Please see below threadhttps://t.co/1wMcudPFFz
— Katie Mummah (@nuclearkatie) April 9, 2022
Which is why I’m not linking the article, and linking Nuclear Katie instead.
I have written before about my fondness for the old Texas Monthly, and my disdain for most of what’s in the current version.
This is an exception, for obvious reasons.
“At One of the Last Classical Music Stores, CDs Still Rock“.
(Archive.is version, because TM can sometimes be skirty if you don’t have a subscription.)
…
…The store was never really about shopping; it was more of a community center or musical salon, where classical buffs gathered to argue about their favorite artists, discuss new releases, and listen to albums on the store’s speakers.
“It’s a hangout,” Sumbera mused. “People don’t just come in and flip through the stacks, pick up a couple of recordings, buy them, and leave. People stick around and chat.”
…
…the logistics of setting up an online storefront for classical music are darn near terrifying.
Think about searching Amazon for a pop album you want to download. You can probably type in “Adele 30” and be done. But the classical world, with composers, soloists, conductors, ensembles, and hundreds of compositions with identical names like “Piano Sonata,” is a database programmer’s nightmare. And then there’s the sheer volume of classical recordings being released. Presto Music, for example, stocks 614 recordings of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
“I don’t think people realize how many classical titles are out there in print right now,” Sumbera pointed out, before offering a ballpark guess: 150,000. Naxos, America’s biggest classical distributor, lists 297 brand-new albums arriving in the month of March alone. Sumbera can’t load all of those into an online store by himself, or even fit the inventory into his building.
Classical Music of Spring is linked on the sidebar, but to save searching…
I broke this obit out into a separate entry because…
…well, to be honest, I forgot I had it in the queue.
But it probably deserves a separate entry, as another one of those obits for a “colorful” newspaper man. He actually kind of sounds like he crossed the border from “colorful” to word that rhymes with “glassbowl”, but I guess some people loved him.
Mike Marley, former sports writer for the NY Post, “but mostly a boxing man unequalled for access, sarcasm, creativity and the ability to dine at the finest restaurants without picking up the check”. He later went on to work with Howard Cosell, and after that became a lawyer.
This is full of great stories, if you like hard-bitten hard-drinking newspaperman stories. There’s the Winter Olympics story. There’s the landlord story.
They don’t make ’em like that any more. And I haven’t made up my mind if this is a bad or a good thing.
I don’t like linking to ESPN.
Duke sucks.
This is one heck of a piece of writing.
(And I’m sorry, Coach K, but I’ll still be pulling for Gonzaga this year.)
The NYPost has provided a vivid reminder not only that we must die, but that tomorrow is not promised to anyone.
On their homepage right now:
“Actress in Thailand dies after falling from speedboat on restaurant trip with friends“. Nida Patcharaweeraphong was 37.
“Minnesota college student killed after house she was dog-sitting at explodes“. Kailey Mach was 20.
“2 killed when BMW plunges off parkway, onto Amtrak tracks in NYC: cops“.
Terry Teachout, critic, blogger, playwright, cultural commentator, and biographer, passed away yesterday.
“About Last Night” blog. WSJ (through archive.is). National Review.
I wrote briefly about him and his blog when his wife died. I was still an irregular follower – I tried to check in once a week – but I knew he had found a new love and was excited about that. This seems especially unfair.
I never met Mr. Teachout, though I would have liked to. He seems like one of those good decent people whose passing leaves a void in the world.
Edited to add: tribute from Rod Dreher.
CNN had an opening, now that they’ve canned Fredo. So who better to hire?
Excited to join @CNN team to continue being part of the discussion on law enforcement and criminal justice. #RelationalPolicing pic.twitter.com/BNsnRSDepF
— Chief Art Acevedo (@ArtAcevedo) December 15, 2021
I missed this, probably because I don’t pay much attention to that network. Thank you to Gun Free Zone for tipping me off.
Supplemental Steven Weinberg obits: NYT. Statesman.
Jackie Mason, comedian.
Mr. Mason regarded the world around him as a nonstop assault on common sense and an affront to his sense of dignity. Gesturing frantically, his forefinger jabbing the air, he would invite the audience to share his sense of disbelief and inhabit his very thin skin, if only for an hour.
“I used to be so self-conscious,” he once said, “that when I attended a football game, every time the players went into a huddle, I thought they were talking about me.” Recalling his early struggles as a comic, he said, “I had to sell furniture to make a living — my own.”
The idea of music in elevators sent him into a tirade: “I live on the first floor; how much music can I hear by the time I get there? The guy on the 28th floor, let him pay for it.”
…
After dozens of appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Mr. Mason encountered disaster on Oct. 18, 1964. A speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson pre-empted the program, which resumed as Mr. Mason was halfway through his act. Onstage but out of camera range, Sullivan indicated with two fingers, then one, how many minutes Mr. Mason had left, distracting the audience. Mr. Mason, annoyed, responded by holding up his own fingers to the audience, saying, “Here’s a finger for you, and a finger for you, and a finger for you.”
Sullivan, convinced that one of those fingers was an obscene gesture, canceled Mr. Mason’s six-show contract and refused to pay him for the performance. Mr. Mason sued, and won.
The two later reconciled, but the damage was done. Club owners and booking agents now regarded him, he said, as “crude and unpredictable.”
“People started to think I was some kind of sick maniac,” Mr. Mason told Look. “It took 20 years to overcome what happened in that one minute.”
…
For the record (and per Wikipedia), “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” went through 182 preview performances.
…
Laura Foreman. She was a prominent and well-regarded reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1970s: so much so that she got hired by the NYT.
Her focus was Philadelphia’s 1975 mayoral race, in which the brash and cocky incumbent, Frank L. Rizzo, the city’s former police commissioner, was seeking a second term.
One of Mr. Rizzo’s close allies was Mr. Cianfrani, a longtime ward boss who became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and one of Pennsylvania’s most influential lawmakers. A streetwise power broker, he was a natural source and occasional subject for the new political writer.
Rumors began circulating that the two were involved romantically, but Ms. Foreman denied them, and the editors discounted them.
After she got hired by the NYT, it came out that the rumors were true: “…the politician had given her more than $20,000 worth of gifts, including jewelry, furniture and a fur coat, and helped her buy a 1964 Morgan sports car.”
The Times told her she had to resign, even though the conduct in question had occurred at another paper. The Times, in fact, said initially that her work had comported with the highest ethical standards. But according to an account that Ms. Foreman wrote in The Washington Monthly in 1978, A.M. Rosenthal, The Times’s executive editor, told her that because the paper was writing tough stories at the time about conflicts of interest involving Bert Lance, a close Carter adviser, it couldn’t very well harbor a conflict of its own.
To others, Mr. Rosenthal uttered an unforgettable comment that has been rendered several different ways but in essence said that he didn’t care if his reporters were having sex with elephants — as long as they weren’t covering the circus.
In Philadelphia, Mr. Roberts, the Inquirer editor, appointed the paper’s top investigative team of Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele to dig into the affair. They produced a 17,000-word article, published on Oct. 16, 1977, that exposed internal rivalries at the paper and found that editors had looked the other way to protect a favored reporter, Ms. Foreman. It was among the first instances of a newspaper turning its investigative artillery on itself.
She married Mr. Cianfrani, but never worked in journalism again. Ms. Foreman actually passed away over a year ago, but her death was only recently reported.
A burning in Hell watch, by way of Lawrence: Rodney Alcala, the “Dating Game” killer.
A longhaired photographer who lured women by offering to take their pictures, Mr. Alcala was convicted of killing a 12-year-old girl and four women in Orange County, Calif., and two women in New York, all between 1971 and 1979, the authorities said.
Investigators had also suspected him of, or had linked him to, other murders in Los Angeles, Seattle, Arizona, New Hampshire and Marin County, Calif., the department said.
…
In 1978, six years after he was convicted of molesting [removed – DB], Mr. Alcala appeared in a brown bell-bottom suit and a shirt with a butterfly collar as “Bachelor No. 1” on an episode of “The Dating Game.”
The host described him as “a successful photographer,” according to a YouTube video. “Between takes, you might find him sky-diving or motorcycling.”
Mr. Alcala won the contest, charming the bachelorette with sexual innuendo. The woman later decided not to go on a date with him because she found him disturbing, according to several news reports.
He was, of course, most famous as Herb Tarlek on “WKRP In Cincinnati” (and “The New WKRP in Cincinnati”, which I don’t think I ever saw an episode of).
His second credit in IMDB is “Equinox“, an odd film that we watched one Halloween season. I remember us saying, “Hey, is that Herb Tarlek? It sure looks a lot like him. Wait, it is!” (His first credit is “The Equinox: Journey into the Supernatural”, the short film that was expanded into “Equinox”.) And somewhat oddly, he has some pre “WKRP” cop show credits…
…including, believe it or not, “Mannix”. (“Catspaw”, season 5, episode 13. He’s listed in IMDB as “Hypnotized man (uncredited)”.)
Heidi Ferrer, writer for “Dawson’s Creek”. She also wrote “The Hottie & the Nottie”. According to her family, she had been fighting COVID-19 for over a year, and took her own life.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
Janet Malcolm, who you may remember from “The Journalist and the Murderer”.
Her essay began with one of the most arresting first sentences in literary nonfiction: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
Her pronouncement enraged the journalistic firmament. Many writers insisted that this was not how they treated their subjects and accused Ms. Malcolm of tarring everyone with the same broad brush.
But what galled some journalists about the piece the most, The Times reported in 1989, “was her failure, and that of her magazine, to disclose that Miss Malcolm had been accused of the same kind of behavior, in a lawsuit filed against her by the subject of an earlier New Yorker article.”
That earlier article, a 1983 profile of the flamboyant psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, led to a libel suit against Ms. Malcolm that hung over her during a decade of litigation and clouded her reputation even longer.
The legal allegations were different: The MacDonald suit accused Mr. McGinniss of fraud and breach of contract; the Masson suit accused Ms. Malcolm of libel. But both suits raised serious questions about journalistic ethics — Dr. MacDonald’s about the nature of writers’ obligations to their sources, and Mr. Masson’s about what constitutes quotations and what license, if any, reporters may take with them.
The journalistic community generally judged Ms. Malcolm harshly, mostly for the finding in the Masson case that she had cobbled together 50 or 60 separate conversations with the loquacious Mr. Masson and made them appear as if he had spoken them in a single lunchtime monologue.
“This thing called speech is sloppy, redundant, repetitious, full of uhs and ahs,” Ms. Malcolm testified in her defense in 1993 during the first of two jury trials. “I needed to present it in logical, rational order so he would sound like a logical, rational person.”
…
I spent far too much time last night reading about celebrity perfumes.
But that wasn’t what I did not know. What I did not know was: