Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

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Obit watch: September 7, 2023.

Thursday, September 7th, 2023

Dr. Ferid Murad, Nobel prize winner.

He shared the prize in 1998 with Dr. Louis J. Ignarro and Dr. Robert F. Furchgott for their work on nitric oxide.

The researchers, working separately but in close communication, pressed ahead, and by the end of the 1980s had established that nitric oxide worked as a sort of signaling agent in the cardiovascular system, similar to hormones or neurotransmitters.
The discovery made possible a wide variety of drugs, most famously Viagra, which facilitates erections by increasing blood flow to the penis. It also saved the lives of countless premature babies, whose underdeveloped lungs needed stimulation, and patients with cardiovascular disease, which restricts blood flow.

Gloria Coates, composer.

Ms. Coates composed 17 symphonies, along with numerous works for small ensembles and voice. In 1999, when she was working on her 11th symphony, the composer and critic Kyle Gann wrote in The New York Times that “Ms. Coates’s symphonies are dark and sensuous, and distinguished by an imaginative use of orchestral glissandos (gradual rather than stepwise changes of pitch, like slow sirens), which culminate powerfully in drawn-out crescendos.”

Gary Wright, musician.

Marcia DeRousse, actress. Other credits include “The Fall Guy” and “St. Elsewhere”.

Giuliano Montaldo, Italian director and writer. IMDB.

From the “not quite an obit” department: Stephen Wolfram on Doug Lenat.

Posted in Geek, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 4, 2023.

Monday, September 4th, 2023

Somebody out there is listening to me.

NYT obit for Marilyn Lovell (archived).

On Christmas Day 1968, while Mr. Lovell was on the Apollo 8 mission, the first manned spaceflight to orbit the moon, Ms. Lovell answered her door to find a representative from Neiman Marcus carrying a large box with moon-themed décor. In it was a mink coat and a note The New York Times would later describe as “the most romantic card in the universe”: “To Marilyn from the Man in the Moon.” Ms. Lovell did her household chores that day in pajamas and her new mink.
On that mission, Mr. Lovell named a triangle-shaped mountain on the lunar surface Mount Marilyn. It would later serve as a landmark for astronauts, and in 2017, after campaigning by Mr. Lovell, the name was officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union.

…

When Ms. Lovell’s 12-year-old daughter, Susan, became hysterical on seeing a priest at their door, Ms. Lovell found a way to soothe her. “Do you really think the best astronaut either one of us knows is going to forget something as simple as how to turn his spaceship around and fly it home?” she asked her daughter, according to Mr. Lovell’s memoir.
Reporters with notebooks, microphones and television cameras filled up the Lovell family lawn and driveway. She fielded a call from President Richard M. Nixon: “I just wanted you to know, Marilyn, that your president and the entire nation are watching your husband’s progress with concern,” he said. “Everything is being done to bring Jim home.”

…

When parachutes were seen on TV billowing out from the spaceship, guiding it safely to the ocean surface, a couple of famous astronauts in Ms. Lovell’s living room, Mr. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, opened champagne. President Nixon called with a new message: “I wanted to know if you’d care to accompany me to Hawaii to pick up your husband.”
She replied, “Mr. President, I’d love to.”

NYT obit for Douglas Lenat (archived).

Running across dozens of computers, Eurisko could discover possibilities that Dr. Lenat — and other humans — had not. But it needed help from human judgment. Machines could not be truly intelligent, he realized, unless they too had common sense.
The project was called Cyc. He set out to define the fundamental but largely unspoken laws that outline how the world works, including everything from “you can’t be in two places at the same time” to “when drinking a cup of coffee, you hold the open end up.” He knew it could take decades — perhaps centuries — to complete the project. But he was determined to try.
In recent years, the Cyc project — and the rule-based approach to A.I. research it represented — has fallen out of favor among leading A.I. researchers. Rather than defining intelligence rule by rule, line of code by line of code, the giants of the tech industry are now focused on systems that learn skills by analyzing massive amounts of digital data. This is how they build popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
Many leading researchers now believe that this kind of sweeping data analysis will eventually reproduce common sense and reasoning. But as today’s computers struggle with even simple tasks and play fast and loose with the truth, others believe that the industry can learn from Dr. Lenat and his never-ending struggle to build common sense by hand.

My favorite Dr. Lenat story is partially in the article: the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron story.

In brief: Game Designers Workshop used to (still may) run a contest where you had a trillion “credits” to design the best possible fleet, according to the rulebook. The contestants were pitted against each other until one fleet won. Dr. Lenet fed the rules into Eurisko and iterated until it came up with what seemed to him to be an optimal strategy. He entered the 1981 tournament with his Eurisko designed fleet…and won.

The next year, GDW changed the rules. Dr. Lenet fed the revised rules into Eurisko, entered the tournament again…and won.

What the NYT obit doesn’t say: The third year, GDW told Dr. Lenet that if he entered the tournament with one of his weird computer designed fleets, they’d just cancel it completely. According to the Traveller wiki, he agreed to accept “the title ‘Grand Admiral’ as consolation.

Steve Harwell, former lead singer of Smashmouth. THR. Pitchfork.

Not much to say about this, really. 56 is awfully young, but all the stories go out of the way to mention his issues. And I was never a big fan of the band, with the possible exception of “Walkin’ on the Sun”.

Gayle Hunnicutt. Other credits include “Mister Roberts” (the TV series), “Get Smart”, and “Marlowe” (the 1969 movie with James Garner). (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Geek, History, Movies, Music, Nixon, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 27, 2023.

Sunday, August 27th, 2023

Bob Barker. THR. Tributes. Variety.

Claude Ruiz-Picasso, son of Pablo and administrator of his estate (through July of this year).

Alexandra Paul, Olympic figure skater from Canada. She was 31.

David LaFlamme, of It’s a Beautiful Day. As usual, I feel guilty not saying more about this, but the band was…not exactly before my time, but I was terribly young then.

Arleen Sorkin, actress. Other credits include “Perry Mason: The Case of the Killer Kiss” (which was the last Perry Mason movie with Raymond Burr), “Frasier”, and “The New Mike Hammer”.

Posted in Art, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

In keeping with the established policy of this blog…

Saturday, August 26th, 2023

…Bob Barker tomorrow, so things have time to settle and obits have time to be corrected.

Posted in Admin, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 25, 2023.

Friday, August 25th, 2023

NYT obit for John Warnock.

Bray Wyatt, pro wrestler. He was 36.

During his time in WWE, he was a three-time world champion, including one WWE Championship and two Universal Championships.

Karol Bobko, astronaut. He was the first pilot of the Challenger. He flew two more shuttle missions (on Atlantis and Discovery).

“Bo was a commander who could lead without ever getting angry with people or raising his voice,” Dr. Hoffman, now a professor of aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said by phone. “He didn’t have to prove he was the boss to get our respect.”

Hersha Parady, actress. Other credits include “The Waltons”, “Bearcats!”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Cry Silence”, season 6, episode 2, credited as “Receptionist”.)

Posted in 1970s, Geek, Mannix, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 24, 2023.

Thursday, August 24th, 2023

Sliman Bensmaia. He wasn’t somebody I’d heard of before his obit was published, but he sounds like a person whose passing leaves a hole in the world.

Dr. Bensmaia was a neuroscientist. His specialty was the sense of touch, and how it worked.

Dr. Bensmaia was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University in the 2000s when the Defense Department, faced with a mounting number of wounded veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, committed $100 million to prosthetics research.
Scientists were making enormous strides in the field of brain-controlled prosthetics, but giving users of such devices a sense of touch was still largely uncharted territory. Patients could not actually feel what they were doing: whether a material was rough or smooth, if it was moving or stable, even where their limb was in space.
Dr. Bensmaia (pronounced bens-MAY-ah) saw his task as taking the next step: understanding how the brain receives and processes information through touch, which in turn could allow prosthetics to perform more akin to an organic limb.

…

He and his team would connect electrodes to areas of the monkeys’ brains, poke spots on their hands and then analyze where the brains received that sensory information, as well as how the animals reacted. They then used electrodes to simulate those pokes, in an attempt to mimic the experience.
“When you imagine moving your arm, that part of the brain is still active, but nothing happens due to the lost connection,” he told the magazine Wireless Design and Development in 2014. “The idea behind the project was to stick electrodes in the brain and stimulate it directly to produce some percepts of touch to better control the modular limb.”
Most scientists focus their labs on either pure or applied research. Dr. Bensmaia’s group — some two dozen undergraduates, grad students, postdocs and technicians — managed to do both. He employed neuroscientists, but also teams of engineers and computer programmers.
“He ran his lab like a small company,” David Freedman, a neurobiologist at Chicago, said in a phone interview.
Such coordination was necessary for the complicated work Dr. Bensmaia engaged in. The sense of touch involves a wide array of finely measured inputs — pressure, heat, movement, hardness — all of which are communicated to the brain through some 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections.

…

In 2016, his team and a group from the University of Pittsburgh outfitted a 28-year-old man, Nathan Copeland, who had been paralyzed from the neck down, with a prosthetic arm that allowed him to feel through its finger tips.

Dr. Bensmaia was 49.

Terry Funk, noted professional wrestler.

He also did some acting, including “Road House”: IMDB.

Nancy Frangione, actress. Other credits include “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century”, “In the Line of Duty: A Cop for the Killing”, and “Matlock”.

This isn’t quite an obit, but Stephen Wolfram wrote a really long (35,000+ words) remembrance of his friend Edward Fredkin. (Previously.)

Posted in Geek, Movies, Neuroscience, Obits, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 22, 2023.

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2023

NYT obit for Inga Swenson, for the record. (Previously.)

John Devitt, Australian swimmer who won two gold medals in the 1960 Olympics…and there’s a story behind that.

...beyond Australia he may be best remembered for his part in the finish of the 100-meter freestyle final in Rome, one of the more freakish moments in sports history. It led to an overhaul of the way the placings and times for swimming races were decided, with electronic timers and photos replacing judgment calls.
Devitt, at 23 and a lean 6-foot-1 in 1960, was captain of the Australian men’s swimming team for the second consecutive Olympics and the race favorite. One opponent was Lance Larson of Monterey Park, Calif., a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Southern California.
In the eight-man final, Devitt was clearly ahead until the last 20 meters, when Larson, in an adjoining lane, caught up to him. They touched the finish wall almost together, with Larson seemingly slightly ahead. Each congratulated the other, and they then both waited for the official results. The wait was excruciating — almost 10 minutes.
In that era, the rules called for three judges to choose first place, three other judges to choose second, and three others to choose third. Each lane had three timekeepers, but their timing, by hand, was almost incidental in determining who finished where. There was no starting beep or automatic touch pads or accepted electronic timing or replays, as there are in major swimming competitions today.
When the judges were polled after the race, the results were unusual. Two of the three first-place judges had picked Devitt as the winner, and one had picked Larson. Two of the second-place judges had picked Devitt for second, and one had picked Larson. The three timekeepers for Devitt’s lane had all timed him in 55.2 seconds. The three in Larson’s lane had timed the American in 55.0, 55.1 and 55.1.
And a newly introduced automatic timing machine — which was started electronically but stopped manually, and which was to be consulted only when judges were tied, as they were in Rome — had Larson in 55.10 seconds and Devitt in 55.16.
It seemed obvious that Larson had won — until the chief judge, Hans Runstromer of Germany, interceded and voted for Devitt.
American officials protested the decision to the jury of appeals, saying the rules did not give the chief judge a vote. Runstromer disagreed. Besides, he said, he had been standing on the finish line and had seen the whole thing. A Sports Illustrated photograph, however, showed that he was 25 yards away at the time and had viewed the finish at an angle.
The appeal failed. The Americans appealed three times more in the next four years and lost every time. As Larson said, “It was a bad deal.”

…

In 2009, a paper in the journal Physical Culture and Sport: Studies and Research concluded that “Runstromer’s decision undoubtedly sanctioned untruth.”
In other words, the study said, Larson had won.
Since the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, all international swim races have been timed electronically.

John Warnock, co-creator of Postscript and co-founder of Adobe.

Maxie Baughan, linebacker.

He came in second in the league’s United Press International rookie of the year balloting and was named to his first of five Pro Bowl selections with the Eagles.
After a trade to the Los Angeles Rams in 1966, Baughan picked up where he had left off. The Rams’ coach George Allen named him the team’s defensive captain and signal caller. Behind the quarterback Roman Gabriel, the Rams reached the divisional round of the playoffs twice over the next five years, with Baughan cleaning up on defense behind the team’s heralded defensive line, known as the Fearsome Foursome, starring Deacon Jones, Lamar Lundy, Rosey Greer and Merlin Olsen.
He would notch four more Pro Bowl appearances during his Rams tenure, adding to an N.F.L. résumé that also included five years as a second-team All-Pro and one as a first-teamer.

Reggie Chaney, former forward for the University of Houston basketball team. He was 23.

Chaney, a forward, played two seasons for the Arkansas Razorbacks before transferring to UH, where he played three more seasons and was part of the Cougars’ 2021 Final Four run. He played in 104 games for Houston, his last of which was during their most recent NCAA Tournament run.

Posted in 1970s, Geek, Obits, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 21, 2023.

Monday, August 21st, 2023

Ron Cephas Jones, actor. THR. Other credits include “Law & Order: Criminal Intent”, “Law & Order: Organized Crime”, and “NYPD Blue”.

Chris Peluso, theater actor.

Randy Minniear, former running back for the New York Football Giants.

After playing fullback at Purdue, he was selected by the Giants in the 20th round of the 1966 NFL Draft and would first play in 1967, when Earl Morrall was the quarterback.
“They rate him as the greatest backup quarterback of all time,” Minniear told the Thursday Night Tailgate podcast in 2021. “And that’s one of the things they say about me. I was the greatest benchwarmer of all time. I will tell you this, while I was down there on the end of the bench by the water bucket not one was stolen in five years.”

“The Peripheral” and “A League Of Their Own” at Amazon Prime. Both of these shows had been renewed for a second season (though “ALOTO” had only been given a four-episode run) but Amazon is apparently re-evaluating their plans in light of the strike.

I don’t care much about the baseball show. I was slightly interested in “The Peripheral” because Big Bill Gibson. But I haven’t watched any of the episodes, and am kind of thinking maybe I should read the book first.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 18, 2023.

Friday, August 18th, 2023

I haven’t done any obits for the past few days, for reasons I don’t want to go into here.

But a few people have sent me some, and it would be rude not to acknowledge them.

Sir Michael Parkinson, British talk show host. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Darren Kent, actor. IMDB. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “Les Misérables” (the TV series), and “C.O.O.L.I.O Time Travel Gangster”. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Paul Brodeur, longtime New Yorker writer.

Mr. Brodeur also reported on the possible dangers of radiation from microwave ovens, computer terminals and electromagnetic power lines. But this reporting was not as widely accepted as his work on asbestos and CFCs.
In 1997, the National Academy of Sciences found little to no evidence of any risk from power-line radiation. Other studies have been far from conclusive. (Mr. Brodeur noted, however, that the World Health Organization classified microwave radiation from cellphones to be a possible carcinogen.)

James L. Buckley, former Senator from New York (and brother of William F. Buckley Jr.).

Posted in Media, Obits, Politics, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: August 14, 2023.

Monday, August 14th, 2023

Shelley Smith, actress. Other credits include the 1989 “Dragnet” revival, “Magnum P.I.” (the original), and “Cover Up“.

Linda Haynes, actress. Other credits include “Judgment: The Court Martial of Lieutenant William Calley”, “In Like Flint” (uncredited), and “Paper Moon” (the TV series: yes, there was a TV series based on the movie. It lasted 13 episodes.)

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | 5 Comments »

Obit watch: August 10, 2023.

Thursday, August 10th, 2023

Robbie Robertson. THR. Pitchfork.

Their final performance on Thanksgiving in 1976 was documented by Martin Scorsese in The Last Waltz, which was released in 1978 and is widely considered an all-time classic music documentary.

I haven’t seen “The Last Waltz” and kind of want to (it is available on Criterion) but I’ve seen it described as “Martin Scorsese interviews Robbie Robertson. Also, he interviews some of Robbie Robertson’s friends about how great Robbie Robertson is.”

In 2020, Scorsese produced Once Were Brothers, a documentary about the Band based mostly on Robertson’s accounts.

…

Some of the Band’s biggest songs were “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and “Up on Cripple Creek.” Music from Big Pink, 1969’s The Band, and 1970’s Stage Fright were critical and commercial hits, with Robertson taking the bulk of the songwriting credit and thus getting a larger share of the group’s money. Helm was consistently vocal in his claim that the majority of their songs had been written collaboratively and that Robertson’s publishing share was unfair. In the 2020 documentary Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, Robertson—one of two living members of the band upon its release—claimed that the others had not contributed due to their drug use.

I may be being a little unfair to Mr. Robertson, but it seems like everyone in The Band who wasn’t Robbie Robertson didn’t get along with him. When one person has an issue, okay, one person has an issue. But when the entire band has issues…

On a related side note, should I give pigpen51 a guest account here and leave writing the music-related obits up to him?

This is breaking news: Johnny Hardwick, who voiced “Dale Gribble” on “King of the Hill”. IMDB.

Edited to add: THR obit for Johnny Hardwick.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 9, 2023.

Wednesday, August 9th, 2023

I’m home now. Regular blogging will resume later, including something of a trip report. And some more gun book blogging is coming soon.

In the meantime:

Robert Swan, actor.

Other credits include “C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America”, “Somewhere in Time”, and (interestingly) the “Nightcrawlers” episode of the 1985 “Twilight Zone” revival. Lawrence is right: that is one heck of a segment.

Rodriguez, the singer/songwriter who was the subject of “Searching for Sugar Man”. I feel bad whenever I post a music related obit, as I just don’t have the knowledge to be able to do these well. pigpen51, would you like to step in here?

Posted in 1970s, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 7, 2023.

Monday, August 7th, 2023

Still on the road, heading home tomorrow (so it will be a travel day, but I expect to get in mid to late afternoon) so this will be quick and short.

William Friedkin. As I told Lawrence when he sent this to me, “Damn.” THR. I have an ambition to see all of his films, even though some of them are hard to get on home video.

And a few years back, I actually saw “Sorcerer” at the Alamo Drafthouse…with William Friedkin in attendance and answering questions from the audience afterwards. The one thing that stood out to me: he had no tolerance for people who Could. Not. Get. To. The. Point.

His most recent work was a new version of The Caine Mutiny, which has been accepted into the Venice Film Festival, which begins this month.

Want to see that.

Friedkin was wry about his mishaps and mistakes. Remembering how he had tossed a Basquiat drawing in the trash and turned down the chance to direct a video for Prince, he noted: “I’ve burned bridges and relationships to the point that I consider myself lucky to still be around. I never played by the rules, often to my own detriment. I’ve been rude, exercised bad judgment, squandered most of the gifts God gave me, and treated the love and friendship of others as I did Basquiat’s art and Prince’s music. When you are immune to the feelings of others, can you be a good father, a good husband, a good friend? Do I have regrets? You bet.”

Sharon Farrell. As the subhead notes, she was in the good “Hawaii 5-0”. But I use “good” with reservations, as she was a regular in the final season, which is generally considered to be pretty weak.

Other credits include “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” (“Chopper”), “Night of the Comet”. and “Harry O”.

John Gosling, keyboard player for the Kinks.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 2, 2023.

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2023

Marc Gilpin, actor. Other credits include “The Legend of the Lone Ranger”, “Fantasy Island”, and “CHiPs”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 1, 2023.

Tuesday, August 1st, 2023

Paul Reubens, aka “Pee-wee Herman”. NYT (archived). THR. Tributes.

Angus Cloud, actor on “Euphoria”. He was 25.

Betty Ann Bruno has passed away at 91.

…Bruno graduated from Stanford University and had a long and successful career in local television, first as a political talk show producer, then as an on-air host and later a reporter for KTVU in the Bay Area. Starting in 1971, she spent more than 20 years with the station, becoming a familiar face to its viewers. Among the major stories she covered was the horrible 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm that killed 25 people and destroyed more than 3,200 homes — including hers.

She was a three-time News Emmy winner. But before all that, as a seven-year-old, she was one of the Munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz”.

Among only a handful of surviving Munchkin actors, Bruno in 2020 published a book called The Munchkin Diary: My Personal Yellow Brick Road, which was written during the Covid lockdown.

Affiliate link to The Munchkin Diary: My Personal Yellow Brick Road on Amazon.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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