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Obit watch: April 25, 2023.

Tuesday, April 25th, 2023

Harry Belafonte. THR.

Ron Faber. The THR obit concentrates on his stage career, but he did do a few movies and TV shows, including “The Exorcist”, “Law and Order”, and “Romeo Is Bleeding”.

Ginnie Newhart, Bob’s wife.

Ginnie and Bob were set up on a blind date by comedian Buddy Hackett (Ginnie was baby-sitting Hackett’s kids at the time).
“Buddy came back one day and said in his own inimitable way, ‘I met this young guy and his name is Bobby Newhart, and he’s a comic and he’s Catholic and you’re Catholic and I think maybe you should marry each other,’ ” she recalled in a 2013 interview.
They played pool at Buddy and his wife’s home the first time they met.
“It was just silly,” she said in 2005. “I was 20, 21, 21, and I think Bob was 32. And every time somebody would sink a ball in the pocket or whatever you’re supposed to do, [we’d] run around the table with our cue stick singing ‘Bridge on the River Kwai.’

They were married for 60 years.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 19, 2023.

Wednesday, April 19th, 2023

Tiger McKee, noted firearms trainer. American Handgunner.

I never had the pleasure of taking a course from Mr. McKee, but I did read his AH columns and The Book of Two Guns: The Martial Art of the 1911 Pistol and AR Carbine. (Amazon says I bought that in 2008. Wow.) And I think I knew that he was doing custom Smith and Wessons, but those were probably out of my price range.

This is a bad loss. And 61 seems a lot closer these days.

(Hattip to pigpen51 on this.)

Carol Locatell, actress. Other credits include “M*A*S*H”, “The Pretender”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”…

…and “Mannix” (“Desert Run”, season 7, episode 6.)

Almost a month ago, I posted an obit Lawrence sent me for Gloria Dea. Yesterday, the paper of record ran their own obit.

One of Ms. Dea’s last movie credits was in Ed Wood’s notoriously bad “Plan 9 From Outer Space” in 1957. She later sold insurance and then cars before settling back in Las Vegas.

IMDB. She’s credited as “Girl”.

Freddie Scappaticci.

During the Troubles (that is, the conflict in Northern Ireland), the British Army had a deep cover mole known as “Stakeknife”.

Stakeknife had penetrated the heart of the I.R.A.’s internal security unit, known as the Nutting Squad, a macabre sobriquet evoking the unit’s standard operating procedure — the execution of accused informers with two bullets to the “nut,” or head. Bodies were usually then dumped.

Mr. Scappaticci led that unit.

He was accused of overseeing the torture and killing of more than 30 suspected informers. If, at the same time, he was the British mole called Stakeknife, then he was a paid British agent killing fellow British agents.

There are a lot of people who believe he was Stakeknife. He consistently denied it.

Mr. Scappaticci may well have taken some of his secrets to his grave, shielding government intelligence and military handlers from one of the central moral conundrums of the case: Did the British state collude in the killings in order to protect Stakeknife’s identity?
British officials have described Stakeknife as the “golden egg” and “the jewel in the crown” of their infiltration of the I.R.A. They have said that intelligence he delivered alerted them to myriad I.R.A. operations, saving hundreds of lives.

…

In 2003, several British newspapers identified Stakeknife as Mr. Scappaticci. He denied the accusations publicly but then dropped out of sight. Several news reports said the British authorities had spirited him away, first to the Italian town of Cassino and then to a witness protection program in Britain.

There is an inquiry going on into Stakeknife. It’s been going on since 2016.

Mr. Boutcher, the head of the Stakeknife inquiry, promised on April 11 that investigators would publish an interim report on their findings this year. But families of victims greeted the news with skepticism.

Wikipedia entry. Why am I reminded of Whitey Bulger?

Posted in 1911, 1970s, Books, Guns, History, Law, Magic, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Smith and Wesson, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: April 13, 2023.

Thursday, April 13th, 2023

Anne Perry, noted mystery writer.

Ms. Perry’s books, including the Thomas Pitt and William Monk series of historical mysteries, have sold more than 26 million copies, according to her website. In 1998, when The Times of London named its 100 Masters of Crime of the past century, there she was on the list alongside Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and Arthur Conan Doyle.
“Heroes,” set in the trenches of World War I, won the 2000 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best short story. In 2013 and 2020, she was a guest of honor at Bouchercon, the international convention of mystery writers and fans.

I hate talking about this, but there’s a huge elephant in the room that I can’t ignore. As a teenager, she was known as Juliet Hulme. Her family moved to New Zealand, where she met Pauline Parker. The two girls became very close friends and “invented an elaborate medieval-like fantasy world and worshiped celebrities, especially the opera singer Mario Lanza, as saints.”

Juliet’s parents decided to divorce and leave New Zealand. The two girls didn’t want to be split up:

In Victoria Park, in Christchurch, the girls — Pauline was 16, Juliet was 15 — struck Honorah Parker in the head repeatedly with half a brick wrapped in a stocking. The trial was a sensation, much of it focusing on Juliet and Pauline’s absorption with each other and their fantasies about becoming famous novelists.
Both young women were convicted of murder, and after five years behind bars (in separate prisons) they were given new identities and instructed never to meet again. If they violated that order, they were warned, they would return to prison and serve life sentences.

The was dramatized in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures”, which I strongly recommend if you can see it. (I checked Amazon: home video copies of this seem very hard to come by.)

Once her murder conviction was revealed, Ms. Perry did not shy away from acknowledging her guilt. She excused herself only by saying that she had been afraid that if she did not go along with the murder plan, her distraught friend might kill herself.
Ms. Perry’s regret did not extend to self-condemnation, however.
“In a sense it’s not a matter — at the end — of judging,” she said in the documentary. “I did this much good and that much bad. Which is the greater?”
“It’s in the end, Who am I? Am I somebody that can be trusted? Am I someone that is compassionate, gentle, patient, strong?” She mentioned other traits: bravery, honesty, caring. “If you’re that kind of person — if you’ve done something bad in the past, you’ve obviously changed.”
She concluded, “It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.”

Someone sent me Virginia Norwood’s obit the other day, but I don’t remember who, and I can’t find it now. USGS.

Ms. Norwood pioneered the scanning technology used on the Landsat satellites.

Ms. Norwood, who was part of an advanced design group in the space and communications division at Hughes, canvassed scientists who specialized in agriculture, meteorology, pollution and geology. She concluded that a scanner that recorded multiple spectra of light and energy, like one that had been used for local agricultural observations, could be modified for the planetary project that the Geological Survey and NASA had in mind.

…

Ms. Norwood and Hughes were told that their multispectral scanner system, or M.S.S., could be included if it weighed no more than 100 pounds.
Ms. Norwood had to scale back her scanner to record just four bands of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum instead of seven, as she had planned. The scanner also had to be high precision. In her first design, each pixel represented 80 meters.
The device had a 9-by-13-inch mirror that banged back and forth noisily in the scanner 13 times a second. The scientists at the Geological Survey and NASA were skeptical.
A senior engineer from Hughes took the device out on a truck and drove around California to test it and convince the doubters that it would work. It did — spectacularly. Ms. Norwood hung one of the images, of Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome, on the wall of her house for the rest of her life.

Her tech was so good, it pretty much completely replaced the main Landsat system. (That system was actually shut down two weeks after the first Landsat launch because of problems.)

Over the next 50 years, new Landsat satellites replaced earlier ones. Ms. Norwood oversaw the development of Landsat 2, 3, 4 and 5. Currently, Landsat 8 and 9 are orbiting the earth, and NASA plans to launch Landsat 10 in 2030. Each generation satellite has added more imaging capabilities but always based on Ms. Norwood’s original concept.

Alicia Shepard, former NPR ombudsman (ombudsperson?).

In June 2009, she wrote on her blog that she had received a “slew of emails” that took issue with NPR News’s use of the phrases “enhanced interrogation tactics” and “harsh interrogation techniques” instead of “torture” to describe what terrorism suspects held by the George W. Bush administration during the Iraq war had been forced to endure.
“Some say that by not using the word ‘torture,’ NPR is serving as right-wing apologists for waterboarding and other methods of extracting information,” Ms. Shepard wrote. President Bush refused to call waterboarding torture, but in April 2009 President Barack Obama did.
Ms. Shepard suggested that rather than labeling enhanced measures as torture, reporters should simply describe the tactics — saying, for example, that “the U.S. military poured water down a detainee’s mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds” or forced detainees “into cramped confines crawling with insects.”

…

Soon after writing her blog post, Ms. Shepard told Bob Garfield, the co-host of the NPR program “On the Media”: “If I were asked personally whether or not pouring water down someone’s nose and throat for 20 seconds constitutes torture, I would say personally that I think it does. I totally understand, though, that a news organization needs to be as neutral as possible, and putting out the facts and letting the audience decide whether something is good or bad, right or wrong.”

Posted in Books, Geek, Law, Media, Movies, Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 10, 2023.

Monday, April 10th, 2023

NYT obit for Craig Breedlove.

Michael Lerner, actor. 186 credits in IMDB (counting the three upcoming), including “Mayor Ebert” in “Godzilla”, “Today’s F.B.I.”, four “Rockford Files”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, and “Banacek”.

Francesca Cappucci. She worked for KABC-TV in LA.

Out of the blue, Quentin Tarantino named the glamorous Italian movie star wife of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton after her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Jacques Haitkin, cinematographer. Other credits include “Fist of the North Star”, “Team Knight Rider”, and “The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything”.

Hobie Landrith.

The Mets and the Houston Colt .45s (now the Astros), founded as 1962 National League expansion teams, began stocking their rosters in an October 1961 draft. They alternated in selecting players whom the eight N.L. teams viewed as too young, too old or too ordinary to keep.
Houston chose Eddie Bressoud, a shortstop with the San Francisco Giants, as the first pick of the draft. The Mets chose Landrith, also a Giant, as their first selection.
When reporters asked Mets Manager Casey Stengel why Landrith, 31 years old, was anointed as the first Met, he replied: “You gotta have a catcher or you’d have a lot of passed balls.”

(Side note: as best as I can tell, Eddie Bressoud is still alive at 90. He was traded to the Red Sox before he played a game with Houston, and then went from the Red Sox to the Mets.)

Landrith had a career batting average of .233 with 34 home runs and 203 runs driven in.
“I was in the major leagues more because I was a good defensive catcher, and the fact that I was good at handling pitchers,” he once told the baseball history website This Great Game. “I always thought I was a fairly decent hitter, but I realized that I wasn’t in the big leagues for my bat.”

Posted in Cars, History, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 7, 2023.

Friday, April 7th, 2023

Mimi Sheraton, former food critic for the NYT. “Remembering Mimi Sheraton’s Writing and Cooking“.

An adventurer with a passion for offbeat experiences, an eclectic taste for foods and the independence to defy pressures from restaurateurs and advertisers, Ms. Sheraton was the first female food critic for The Times. She pioneered reviewing-in-disguise, dining in wigs and tinted glasses, and using aliases for reservations, mostly in high-end places where people knew her from repeat visits and lavished their attentions on her.
“The longer I reviewed restaurants, the more I became convinced that the unknown customer has a completely different experience from either a valued patron or a recognized food critic,” she wrote in her memoir, “Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life” (2004). “For all practical purposes, they might as well be in different restaurants.”
Colleagues and other restaurant critics described her reviews as tough but fair and scrupulously researched. The Times required three visits to a restaurant before publishing a review; she dined six to eight times before passing judgment. For an article on deli sandwiches, she collected 104 corned beef and pastrami samples in one day to evaluate the meat and sandwich-building techniques.

…

Another of her reviews, based on blind tastings by several Times staff members, favored private-label liquors over popular brand names of Scotch, bourbon, rye, vodka and gin. The review ran weeks before Christmas, the busy liquor-selling season.
“I heard that two million dollars’ worth of advertising had been canceled,” Ms. Sheraton recalled in her memoir. She approached the executive editor. “I asked Abe Rosenthal if that was true. He said, ‘That’s none of your business. It was a great story.’”

…

In her Greenwich Village townhouse, she had 2,000 cookbooks and a spacious kitchen overlooking a backyard where she grew chives, tarragon, mint, sage, rosemary and basil. And she read other restaurant critics, with whom she often disagreed.
“Well, whether they’re right or not, which means they agree with me,” she told The Times wryly in 2004, “food writers in general devote too much space to chefs’ philosophies. They’re not Picasso, after all — this is supper. So I don’t want to hear about a chef’s intentions. Call me when it’s good.”

Bill Butler, noted cinematographer. Other credits include “Raid on Entebbe”, “Capricorn One”, and “Hot Shots!”.

Nora Forster, John Lydon’s wife.

The punk rock icon and Forster met in 1975 at Vivienne Westwood’s famed punk shop Sex and married in 1979, according to Rolling Stone.
The two remained married till Forster’s death and did not have children.

Paul Cattermole, of S Club 7.

Posted in Food, Media, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 3, 2023.

Monday, April 3rd, 2023

Ryuichi Sakamoto, Japanese musician. THR.

Cool story, bro:

In summer 2018, it emerged that Sakamoto had found the music so bad at his favorite Japanese restaurant in Manhattan (he had long divided his time between Tokyo and New York) that he contacted the chef and offered to create a playlist. He went on to do the same for a new bar and restaurant the chef opened, without payment or fanfare.

More:

Equally comfortable in futuristic techno, orchestral works, video game tracks and intimate piano solos, Mr. Sakamoto created music that was catchy, emotive and deeply attuned to the sounds around him. Along with issuing numerous solo albums, he collaborated with a wide range of musicians across genres, and received an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globes.
His Yellow Magic Orchestra, which swept the charts in the late 1970s and early ’80s, produced catchy hits like “Computer Game” on synthesizers and sequencers, while also satirizing Western ideas of Japanese music.
“The big theme of him is curiosity,” the musician Carsten Nicolai, a longtime collaborator, said in a phone interview in 2021. “Ryuichi understood, very early, that not necessarily one specific genre will be the future of music — that the conversation between different styles, and unusual styles, may be the future.”

He also acted a little:

Mr. Sakamoto was beginning to achieve wide recognition in the early 1980s when the director Nagisa Oshima asked him to co-star, alongside David Bowie, in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Mr. Sakamoto, having no background in acting, agreed under the condition that he could also score the film.
The movie’s synth-heavy title track remained one of Mr. Sakamoto’s most famous compositions. He often adapted it, including for “Forbidden Colors,” a vocal version with the singer David Sylvian, as well as piano renditions and sweeping orchestral arrangements.

…

He began piano lessons at age 6, and started to compose soon after. Early influences included Bach and Debussy — whom he once called “the door to all 20th century music” — and he discovered modern jazz as he fell in with a crowd of hipster rebels as a teenager. (At the height of the student protest movement, he and his classmates shut down their high school for several weeks.)
Mr. Sakamoto was drawn to modern art and especially the avant-garde work of Cage. He studied composition and ethnomusicology at Tokyo University of the Arts and began playing around with synthesizers and performing in the local pop scene.

…

In 1978, Mr. Sakamoto released his debut solo album, “Thousand Knives,” a trippy amalgam that opens with the musician reciting a poem by Mao through a vocoder, followed by a reggae beat and a procession of Herbie Hancock-inspired improvisations. That year, the bassist Haruomi Hosono invited him and the drummer Yukihiro Takahashi to form a trio that became Yellow Magic Orchestra. (Mr. Takahashi died in January.)
The band’s self-titled 1978 album was a huge hit, and influenced numerous electronic music genres, from synth pop to techno. The group broke up in 1984, in part because Mr. Sakamoto wanted to pursue solo work. (They have periodically reunited since the 1990s.) Mr. Sakamoto continued tinkering with outré, high-tech approaches in his 1980 album “B-2 Unit,” which included the otherworldly electro single “Riot in Lagos.”

Lawrence mentioned that we’ve actually seen two films scored by Mr. Sakamoto in the past 12 months (“The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant”).

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 31, 2023.

Friday, March 31st, 2023

Mark Russell. THR.

Presidents from Eisenhower to Trump caught the flak. He sang “Bail to the Chief” for Richard M. Nixon, urged George H.W. Bush to retire “to a home for the chronically preppy,” likened Jimmy Carter’s plan to streamline government to “putting racing stripes on an arthritic camel,” and recalled first seeing Ronald Reagan “in the picture-frame department at Woolworth’s, between Gale Storm and Walter Pidgeon.”
Did he have any writers? “Oh, yes — 100 in the Senate and 435 in the House of Representatives.” The true meaning of the Cold War? “In communism, man exploits man. But with capitalism, it’s the other way around.” Gun control? “I will defend my Second Amendment right to use my musket to defend my Third Amendment right to never, ever allow a British soldier to live in my house.”

I was a big Mark Russell fan when I was in high school, but I lost touch with his work after I went to college the first time.

Critics said that the political satire of Mort Sahl and Tom Lehrer had more cutting edge, but Mr. Russell thrived on subtler material that went over with students, politicians and public television audiences. He exploited popular presidential images: Gerald R. Ford’s stumbling, Bill Clinton’s sexual foibles, Reagan’s jelly beans. But he also struck a balance between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, with humor that required a certain familiarity with national and international affairs, if not political sophistication.

Michael Blackwood, filmmaker. He wasn’t someone I’ve heard of before, but I want to find some of his work.

He followed the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk on tour in Europe. He tagged along as the minimalist composer Philip Glass prepared for the 1984 premieres of his opera, “Akhnaten,” in Houston and Stuttgart, Germany.
He observed the creative process of the Bulgarian-born conceptual artist Christo during his creation of epic environmental projects like “Running Fence” and “Wrapped Walkways.” And he let Isamu Noguchi explain his approach to his art as they walked among his sculptures.

…

His fascination with architecture led him to make films about some of its stars, including Louis Kahn, Richard Meier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry.
In his review of “Frank Gehry: The Formative Years” (1988) in The New York Times, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote that Mr. Blackwood “has built up an admirable oeuvre of films about architects and architecture,” and that Mr. Blackwood has Mr. Gehry “ramble though his work in a way that is both inviting and informative.”

…

In a 1993 film, “The Sensual Nature of Sound,” Mr. Blackwood examined four distinctive performers and composers — Laurie Anderson, Tania León, Meredith Monk and Pauline Oliveros — devoting significant time to their discussions of their own work.

…

Mr. Blackwood also made films about subjects who were not artists, like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe and the diplomat George F. Kennan, and several about Germany and German Americans.

Posted in Art, Christo, Gehry, Movies, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 23, 2023.

Thursday, March 23rd, 2023

Norman Steinberg, screenwriter.

Gordon T. Dawson, writer and producer. He worked on five Peckinpah movies, wrote nine “Rockford Files” scripts, and did a lot of work on “Walker, Texas Ranger”. Other credits include “Lou Grant”, “Black Sheep Squadron”, and two episodes of a spinoff of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

Peter Werner, director. Lawrence sent this over because he’d done a lot of “Justified” and “Elementary”. Other credits include “Boomtown”, “Almost Golden: The Jessica Savitch Story”, and “Moonlighting”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 20, 2023.

Monday, March 20th, 2023

Simone Segouin. She was 97.

She was a French resistance fighter as a teenager.

Given false papers saying she was Nicole Minet, of Dunkirk, Ms. Segouin ferried messages and weapons among members of the local partisan network on a bicycle she had stolen from a German. Lt. Boursier said he taught her how to use submachine guns, rifles and handguns. According to President Macron’s office, she also helped the partisans sabotage German troop trains.

She was also the subject of a “Life” profile by Jack Belden:

His article, headlined “The Girl Partisan of Chartres” in the Sept. 4, 1944, issue of Life, made “Nicole” an international symbol of the French resistance. Its sub-headline — “Pretty 17-year-old Nicole tells Life’s war reporter the story of how she killed a Boche,” French slang for a German — offered a whiff of the sensational.

…

“The article gave her a larger-than-life profile,” Robert Gildea, the author of “Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of French Resistance,” wrote in an email. “Most women resisters operated in the shadow and were modest about their resistance activities.”

New York Public Library digital archive.

Lawrence sent over two interesting obits:

Gloria Dea, the first magician to perform on the Vegas Strip.

On May 14, 1941, at only 19 years old, Dea performed in the Roundup Room at the El Rancho Vegas. That made her the first magician to ever perform on Highway 91, which wouldn’t be renamed Las Vegas Boulevard for 18 more years. (At the time, only the El Rancho Vegas and Last Frontier lined the road. The Flamingo was still under construction.)
Dea performed two shows that night. The crowds went wild for her billiard-ball trick and a floating-card trick, both taught to her by her father.
“It felt good,” Dea told the R-J at her birthday bash in August. “Anytime someone likes something that you do, you feel good don’t you? Oh, yeah. I was received wonderfully. It was a great room. You had the audience seated, then floor-to-ceiling glass in the back, and on the other side of that was the swimming pool.”
“Then you were onstage, facing that. It was fancy. It was a fun place.”

Byrd Odum Holland, makeup artist and actor.

Lawrence pointed out “The Creeping Terror”. We have “Five Minutes to Live“: I bought it on a cheap gas station DVD that I couldn’t pass up because it also had “Land of the Free” (Shatner!) We haven’t watched “Five Minutes” yet, but I am trying to sell the Saturday Movie Group on it because it sounds interesting. Johnny Cash plays a psychotic killer in one of only two “theatrical film roles” he played in his career (as opposed to appearances on TV and in documentaries).

Mr. Holland’s other acting credits include “Swamp Girl” and “The Black Klansman” (1966).

NYT obit for Jim Gordon, which, while late, is better than some of the other obits I’ve seen.

Posted in History, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 18, 2023.

Saturday, March 18th, 2023

Sgt. First Class Michael “Ty” Kettenhofen (US Army).

Sgt. Kettenhofen was a member of the Golden Knights parachute team. He was training at Homestead Air Reserve Base on Monday when he was badly injured in a landing, and died in a hospital after surgery.

Statement from the US Army. This happened on Monday, but I did not see it widely reported until yesterday.

Lance Reddick. THR. Tributes.

Mr. Reddick attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., where he studied classical composition. He was a skilled pianist and in 2010 released an album of his own works, “Contemplations & Remembrances.”

The only thing I really knew him from was “The Wire” (and a blink-and-you’ll miss it role in “Godzilla vs. Kong”), but he was a lot more diverse than that.

60 doesn’t seem that old these days, does it?

Jerry Samuels, also known as “Napoleon XIV” of “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” fame.

In an interview quoted on Wayne Jancik’s website about one-hit wonders, Mr. Samuels said that nine years before recording “They’re Coming to Take Me Away,” he spent eight months in a psychiatric hospital.
“When I did the record, I knew it wouldn’t offend mental patients,” he said. “I would have laughed at it if I had heard it when I was in the hospital.”

From Wikipedia:

Continuing the theme of insanity, the flip or B-side of the single was simply the A-side played in reverse, and given the title “!aaaH-aH ,yawA eM ekaT oT gnimoC er’yehT” (or “Ha-Haaa! Away, Me Take to Coming They’re”) and the performer billed as “XIV NAPOLEON”…
In his Book of Rock Lists, rock music critic Dave Marsh calls the B-side the “most obnoxious song ever to appear in a jukebox”, saying the recording once “cleared out a diner of forty patrons in two minutes flat.”

Given that the song played forward is 2:10 long, and I assume played backward is the same length, I’m not sure that statement implies what Mr. Marsh thinks it implies…

I also want to point out that among the “many covers” of the song is one by LARD (a Jello Biafra side project)…that’s over eight minutes long. You can find it on the ‘Tube, if you’re interested.

Jim Mellen, one of the original Weathermen. Apparently, he left the group before they rebranded as the Weather Underground and started blowing things up (including themselves).

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

Obit watch: March 10, 2023.

Friday, March 10th, 2023

Robert Blake. LAT. THR.

Yes, yes, “Baretta” and Bonny Lee Bakley. Also: “The Court of Last Resort”, “The F.B.I.”, “Electra Glide in Blue”, and “12 O’Clock High” among other credits. I’ve seen “In Cold Blood” but it was a long time ago. (I think I actually rented it on VHS.) I’d like to see it again: my recollection is that it was an excellent adaptation of what I consider to be a very good book, with some astonishing cinematography.

I can’t tell if Blake was the last surviving “Our Gang” member or not. If he wasn’t, he was certainly pretty darn near being the last one.

(And on a side note: “Fred” was actually played by two different Triton cockatoos: “Lala” and “Weird Harold”. “Weird Harold” was a “stunt double” that they only used when “Fred” was flying. I don’t know if either one is still alive, but the San Diego Zoo website claims that, with proper care, cockatoos can live anywhere from 60 years to a full century.)

The Reno Air Races. At least, in their present form. (Hattip to FotB RoadRich.)

The first major step in its demise happened Thursday when the Reno-Tahoe Airport Authority’s board of trustees voted unanimously to authorize its president and CEO, Daren Griffin, to negotiate final terms for the event.
It calls for the event this year from Sept. 13 to 17 to be the final air race at Reno-Stead Airport, with an air show in 2024 to celebrate its 60th anniversary.

But:

Although the Stead location is off the table, the Reno Air Racing Association – which organizes the event – sent out an email Thursday afternoon saying, “We are committed to finding a new location so that the event can continue. In fact, we are currently exploring several other possible locations to host the event in the future but it starts with making this year’s event the biggest and most successful it can be.”
Among the challenges cited in this decision was an increase in insurance costs for the event from $780,000 to $1.3 million and regional growth that makes hosting it at Reno-Stead Airport more challenging.

I’ve been to Reno fairly recently, but have never been to the air races. (Always wanted to go, though.) I hope they find a new location. But I’m having a lot of trouble, just based on what I saw when I was in the area, visualizing a location that has the required infrastructure and space to support all those planes, as well as having enough hotels/motels/campgrounds to house the crowd coming in for the races. Perhaps the plan is to move to another location in Nevada? Or out of Nevada? I have a vague memory that there was talk about doing air races in South Texas some time ago…

Posted in 1970s, Birds, Law, Movies, Obits, Planes, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 9, 2023.

Thursday, March 9th, 2023

Great and good FotB Borepatch sent over an obit from Military.com for Jack Holder, who died February 24 at the age of 101.

Mr. Holder was a WWII veteran and a survivor of Pearl Harbor.

The young sailor survived that day by diving into a ditch between airplane hangars to avoid getting strafed by a Japanese pilot.
He went on to fly as a flight engineer on a PBY at Midway, scouting for Japanese forces with squadron VP-23. He later flew missions over Guadalcanal, retrained on the new B-24 and completed his WWII service flying missions over the English Channel. All in all, the young man had himself quite an eventful war.

He wrote a memoir, Fear, Adrenaline, and Excitement which you can get from Amazon.

On the occasion of an honor flight that celebrated his 100th birthday in December 2021, Holder announced that the secret to his long life was “good heart exercise and two scotch and sodas every night.”
There was a party after the 2019 “Midway” screening at the STK Restaurant at the W Hotel, the kind of hip, contemporary joint that makes a lot of folks over the age of 50 uncomfortable. Holder was right at home and was one of the very last people to leave as the night wound down.
The Jack Holder I met was slyly funny, incredibly enthusiastic about meeting new people and very excited about the chance to talk to younger women. The bonus for him was that almost every single woman he met qualified as a younger woman.

The Notorious B.I.G. “B.I.G.” in this case is Bert I. Gordon, who passed away yesterday at 100. THR.

For those of you who don’t know, Mr. Gordon was a monster movie impresario.

Six months after the release of the popular “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” directed by Jack Arnold, American International Pictures distributed Mr. Gordon’s “The Amazing Colossal Man” (1957). Caught in a nuclear accident, the title character grows to 60 feet and is shot by the police in Las Vegas. Variety said the film’s technical aspects were “well handled,” and other reviews were generally positive.

I’ve actually never seen that, but I have the impression that it is pretty good.

In “Beginning of the End” (1957), a scientist (Peter Graves) uses radiation to make giant fruits and vegetables to end world hunger, but a plague of giant grasshoppers that has eaten the food invades Chicago and starts feasting on people. Lured into Lake Michigan with an electronic mating call, the grasshoppers drown. Mr. Gordon did the special effects in his garage, filming 200 grasshoppers jumping and crawling on photos of the city. Reviewers called the special effects absurdly obvious and the screenplay ludicrous.

Elements of the beach-party genre were combined with Mr. Gordon’s usual themes in “Village of the Giants” (1965). A substance called “goo,” produced with a boy’s chemistry set, causes gigantism in a gang of rocking teenagers, who become 30-foot delinquents running amok in a California town. More chemistry-set magic produces an antidote, and all returns to normal. The Los Angeles Times’s reviewer liked the special effects and the “endless views of healthy young torsos gyrating to the rhythms.”

We watched the MST3K version of this one fairly recently. It is not anywhere near as good as the NYT makes it sound.

Orson Welles, often desperate for money to finance his own films, starred in Mr. Gordon’s “Necromancy,” about a sinister man who wields mystical powers over a small town with rituals seeking to bring back the dead.
Ms. Lupino appeared in “The Food of the Gods,” one of three Gordon films loosely based on H.G. Wells tales, which portrayed people on an island fighting overgrown rats, wasps and chickens that have lapped up radioactive stuff that looks like pancake batter oozing from the ground. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film “stunningly ridiculous.”

His autobiography on Amazon.

All this was fodder for the hosts of the comedy series Mystery Science Theater 3000, which brought the Gordon canon to a new audience. “I watched it one time, and I didn’t like them making fun of [his work],” he said. “I take my films very seriously.”

Left out of most discussions I’ve seen: “Tormented”, which we also watched the MST3K version of. I don’t think it is as bad as “Village of the Giants”…

(Yeah, I might be a little unfair in referencing the MST3K versions. But for the ones I’ve seen, I’ll steal a line from Gene Siskel about another movie: “If the third reel had been the missing footage from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, this movie still would have sucked.”)

Chaim Topol, or just “Topal”, of “Fiddler on the Roof” fame. THR.

Other credits include both “The Winds of War” and “War and Rememberance”, “SeaQuest 2032”, “For Your Eyes Only”, and he played Dr. Zarkov in the 1980 “Flash Gordon”.

Posted in History, Movies, Obits, Planes, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 8, 2023.

Wednesday, March 8th, 2023

Dr. Justin O. Schmidt. He was an entomologist, and you may actually have heard of him.

Dr. Schmidt invented the “Pain Index for Stinging Insects”.

He ranked, from 1 to 4, the pain caused by the stings of 80 types of bees, wasps and ants that he had encountered, and gave vivid descriptions of what they felt like.
Anthophorid bee, Level 1: “Almost pleasant, a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard.”
The bullhorn acacia ant, Level 1.5: “A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.”
Red-headed paper wasp, Level 3: “Immediate, irrationally intense and unrelenting. This is the closest you will come to seeing the blue of a flame from within the fire.”
Bullet ant, Level 4: “Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.”

…

“He was one of the most insatiably curious people I’ve ever met,” Stephen Bachmann, a colleague at the Hayden center and a close friend, said in a telephone interview. “He questioned everything and didn’t suffer fools, especially administrators.”
Martha Hunter, a professor of entomology at the University of Arizona, where Dr. Schmidt was an adjunct scientist, called him “an amazing natural historian” with an extensive knowledge of the plants of the Sonoran desert, in addition to stinging insects.
“The story is that Justin once grabbed a tarantula hawk, just to see what the sting would be like,” she said. “It’s the last thing I would do.”
The tarantula hawk, a kind of wasp, ranked a 4 on the pain index:
“Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair dryer has just been dropped in your bubble bath.”

David Lindley, noted musician. He did a lot of session work:

With his head-turning mastery of seemingly any instrument with strings, Mr. Lindley became one of the most sought-after sidemen in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Mixing searing slide guitar work with global stylings on instruments from around the world, he brought depth and richness to recordings by luminaries like Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, Warren Zevon, Ry Cooder and Iggy Pop.

…

He is best known for his work with Mr. Browne, with whom he toured and served as a featured performer on every Browne album from “For Everyman” (1973) to “Hold Out” (1980). His inventive fretwork was a cornerstone of many of Mr. Browne’s biggest hits, including the smash single “Running on Empty,” on which Mr. Lindley’s plaintive yet soaring lap steel guitar work helped capture both the exhaustion and the exhilaration of life on the road, as expressed in Mr. Browne’s lyrics.
Mr. Lindley’s guitar and fiddle could also be heard on landmark pop albums like Ms. Ronstadt’s “Heart Like a Wheel” (1974), which included the No. 1 single “You’re No Good,” and Rod Stewart’s “A Night on the Town” (1976), highlighted by the chart-topping single “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright).”
Ever on the hunt for new sounds and textures, Mr. Lindley had “no idea” how many instruments he could play, as he told Acoustic Guitar magazine in 2000. But throughout his career he showed a knack for wringing emotion not only from the violin, mandolin, banjo, dulcimer and autoharp, but also from the Indian tanpura, the Middle Eastern oud and the Turkish saz.

Ed Fury. He has a fair number of credits in IMDB, mostly small roles, including “The F.B.I.”, “The Wild Women of Wongo”, “The Magician”, and a minor SF TV show from the 1960s.

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

Obit watch: March 6, 2023.

Monday, March 6th, 2023

Gary Rossington, founding member of Lynyrd Skynyrd.

In 1976, Rossington survived a devastating car wreck in which he drove his Ford Torino into a tree. The crash inspired Lynyrd Skynyrd’s song “That Smell.” Only a year later, in 1977, he survived the tragic plane crash in Mississippi that killed lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and backing vocalist Cassie Gaines.
Rossington broke both arms and a leg and punctured his stomach and liver in the infamous plane crash.

Jerry Richardson, former NFL player and former owner of the Carolina Panthers.

Mr. Richardson was only the second former player to own a team (George Halas of the Chicago Bears was the other), and he made the most of his two seasons in the league. A wide receiver for the Baltimore Colts, he caught a touchdown pass from quarterback Johnny Unitas in the 1959 N.F.L. title game and used his bonus of several thousand dollars to pay for the first Hardee’s hamburger restaurant in Spartanburg, S.C.
Mr. Richardson would open hundreds more restaurants in the next 30 years, making him one of the richest men in the Carolinas.

…

In 2017, he announced he was selling the Panthers soon after Sports Illustrated reported on accusations that he sexually harassed women working for the team and that he had used a racial slur in the presence of a Black scout. The league investigation into Mr. Richardson’s workplace behavior led to a $2.75 million fine. But by then, he had already reached an agreement to sell the team for a then-record $2.3 billion. Mr. Richardson never publicly addressed the allegations.

…

After his second season, he asked for a raise to $10,000. After the team offered $9,750, Richardson returned to Spartanburg, and with his former college teammate, Charles Bradshaw, bought the first Hardee’s hamburger restaurant there. Mr. Richardson was hands-on, cleaning parking lots, mopping floors and flipping burgers.
“He was very serious, very intent, and very quickly found himself to be interested in the running of the businesses,” said Hugh McColl, the former chief executive of Bank of America who, in the 1960s, lent Mr. Richardson $25,000 to open a Hardee’s in Charlotte, and who later helped him purchase the Panthers and build a new stadium.
Decades ago, Mr. McColl visited a Hardee’s with Mr. Richardson and watched him pick up trash outside the restaurant and hand it to the manager. “I’ve never seen it before or since,” he said of Mr. Richardson’s attention to detail.

Dave Wills, radio guy for the Tampa Bay Rays. He was 58.

Darin Jackson, a veteran member of the Sox broadcast team, always looked forward to catching up with Wills when the teams met.
“Man, he was as big as life. Dave was always a legend in the city of Chicago,” Jackson said. “And he was a good man for the game of baseball. If you had Dave as part of any organization, you’ve got yourself a true warrior going to war with you guys and for you guys.
“That’s what I remember most about Dave when he was doing his job. He was there to let the people know the truth. He was there to be honest about the organization. And he wasn’t afraid to go ahead and hold people to task. I loved that about him. He’s going to be missed.”

For the record: NYT obits for Ricou Browning and Gordon Pinsent.

Posted in Movies, Music, NFL, Obits, Radio, Sports | Comments Closed

Brief notes on film.

Sunday, March 5th, 2023

We went to see “Cocaine Bear” yesterday.

Summary: if you only see one movie called “Cocaine Bear” this year, this is the one to see.

More seriously, “Cocaine Bear” delivers exactly what it advertises. There’s a bear, it eats a bunch of cocaine, and it mauls people. If this sounds like your cup of dark humored tea, you’ll probably enjoy this movie. If you’re asking yourself “Why would anyone go see a movie called ‘Cocaine Bear’?” or “Is there anyone in it I’ve ever heard of?”, this is almost certainly not the movie for you.

Two quick spoiler free notes:

1. There is not, as of this moment, an Internet Movie Firearms Database entry for “Cocaine Bear”. I hope this changes soon. I want to know what Ranger Liz was carrying. (It looked like some sort of Smith and Wesson to me. Maybe a Model 19 Combat Magnum, although it could possibly have been a Model 27. Lawrence observed that he thought the gun changed size in between scenes, so there could have been a continuity problem and perhaps they used both?) Other people wanted to know what Syd was using, and I’m kind of curious about that myself. And then there’s Bob (a Detective Special?) and Daveed (a Tokarev?)…

2. It is rare that a trailer actually makes me angry. But there’s a upcoming movie with Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx doing voice work that succeeded in doing so. I won’t name the movie here (though a quick IMDB search would probably turn it up) so that I don’t give it any publicity. But based on what I saw in the trailer, everyone who worked on this pile of canine (waste) starting with the producers, extending down to Ferrell and Foxx, and going on down the line until we get to the craft services people, should have their license to work in film revoked and should be forced to get honest work. Perhaps cleaning out dog kennels.

Geez. Even the trailer for “Indiana Jones and I’m Getting To Old for this Stuff” didn’t make me mad. (Actually, I think there’s a possibility that could be fun. But I’ve only seen “Last Crusade” out of all the Indy films. No, I’ve never seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, and I never watched “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles”. Point being, I don’t have a huge personal investment in the Indy franchise, so I may not be the best judge of these things.)

(The last trailer I can think of that actually made me angry was “All the Vermeers in New York”. And the problem with that wasn’t so much the movie itself, or even the trailer. It was that I seemed to be going to a lot of movies at the old Dobie Theater back then, and every time I went to one, they played that d–ned trailer until I got sick of it.)

Posted in Guns, Movies, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

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